Thursday, July 16, 2020
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
yellow rose
From Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet
Saturday, June 27, 2020
A City Glimpse
In the morning light the city lies silent,
Slowly it awakes with the rising sun,
And life moves along its streets,
Children walking to school,
Joggers on the run to keep fit,
Vehicles roaring to arrive first.
I walk with you by my side,
Through the lanes and roads,
Turning once in a while to smile,
Laugh or reply to something you,
Just told me with the wonder,
Of a child shining in your eyes.
I love the city in the morning light,
Only when you walk with me.
Being
And desires like creepers murmur,
In the dark cloudy sky to trees,
Until you come with your silence
And rain bursts in my space,
Where you are is my dream,
That I would exchange my being,
For being the air around you.
Springtime
A song for you
Of all the songs that have been made,
For you, until they turn old and fade,
This one is short and may be the best,
In this world, I love you the most.
Let new songs come and years pass,
I cant find a word that rhymes with pass..;-)
(well, I can, what i mean is I don't want to)
Don't have much to say,only new words,
Come and take place of the old ones.
Scent of rain
The earth forgets the scorching summer,
At the first drop of pelting rain
And its scents are translated into perfumes
Waterlily
You and Me
You and I don't have anything common between us apart from our love for words. You love stringing words together; beautiful words that collide against my mind, when I encounter them somewhere in books. They show how you have been digging words, their meanings and their various tones to paint pictures.
While here I sit and sweat trying to express what is on my mind; for words fail when it comes to what I feel for you. So I try to explain mystery after mystery, glance after glance, suddenly remembered conversations that bring you clear before me.
You and I have been away from each other for too long. Sometimes, I find that the colour of your words have faded and died. It has nothing to do with me, I know, but the fact is that it no longer makes me laugh or cry unlike earlier and I long for those unwritten words of yours.
A sacred space
For a time, life meant complete relaxation. Getting up late, making black tea and later lunch, listening to favourite songs (which prompted a question from a curious neighbour who thought it was a guy who played music), checking mails, replying to them and sitting to read on my favourite chair.
That chair was like a haven. The view was restricted with a wall, sometimes with a cat on it, the road you can see at a distance, the neighbour's houses (where at night, the sound of the lady scraping the last bit of food from the vessel for her husband could be heard in my room even with the windows closed) and a guava tree.
On days when I cleaned my room, after the work is done, I would sit and stare, first at my ultra-clean room with white floor (God, I miss my room, with the neatly arranged furniture, whose position I change during every cleaning session, though I am no blood relative of Tuglaq) and after a while at the scene outside. Once or twice I have seen the neighbour plucking the ripe fruits from the guava tree. Anyway, the ripe smell of its soft tasty flesh reached me all those times.
Once, on an idle day, I saw that this guava tree has a strange resemblance to a human form (with a well-shaped posterior) though upside down, with intertwined arms like an ancient supplicant praying incessantly to the gods. I even made a rough sketch of this sight.
Now living with a husband who runs a chidiyakhana (he’s fond of pets and keeps two cages of budgies in the room) that drives me mad at times, I miss my room of single days- my neat sparkling room with a lot of space and with a good view.
Unhappy Endings
I was only ten when I learnt about unhappy endings.
Like when I knew my grandmother had cancer,
I kneeled in churches, for God answers a kid’s prayers, they said.
She died and I didn’t meet her to say one goodbye.
She looked like a horrible nightmare,
Not the one you saw last, not the one you loved,
A swollen, ugly remnant of what was once beloved, they said.
Once botched goodbye, an unresolved parting for a little girl,
There were no tears for her, only numbness that didn’t feel real,
From that chirpy girl who never gave her a proper burial,
Who died a little that day, with prayers unanswered,
Full of questions but never with answers or resolutions,
Now, I’ve grown older with bungled muted loves,
Improper goodbyes, giving up too easily, too easily.
Tales of love
In the dark rainy nights,
She sang lullabies to us,
In a very sweet voice.
The stories lived before us,
Brave knights and lovely ladies,
All fighting for love.
Both of us, listened wide-eyed
Lying on each of her arms,
As truth and love ruled.
Little did she know of its truth,
As we grew older, we realised,
With pain and disillusionment.
How our childish hearts soaked up,
These unreal tales of happiness,
And real love, truth and honour.
She said, love makes us whole,
She sang, never forget your truth.
She sang you are special.
Now aged and crooked, she sits,
She has lost her sweetness
And we, our innocence.
For him, love is sad and lost,
For me, love is cruel and lost,
For her, life is lonely and gone.
Yet the old hope in tales flicker,
When we meet a smile,
Of understanding in her eyes.
Unending Love by Tagore
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and re-made the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.
You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another
We have played alongside millions of lovers shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell –
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.
Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours
And the song of every poet past and forever.
self
The Come-back
The yellow metal lured while the frail fingers clutched,
Dark nights were denied sleep but love reigned,
In pale cottons with jerry work, in the silent long hours
Much run stories of mind, they come back vividly, like a cat,
Suddenly upon the threshold of my quiet life, intruding.
Where would I bury that secret desire, one long love?
One long love, the sacred spaces uttered fearlessly,
For this love that never was or will be bound by time,
Or by hands that touch or lips that kiss or whisper,
Only by a strange silence that tells you about me,
In circular miles that entangle with despair,
They begin nowhere and end nowhere,
A nowhere from where I turned
But couldn’t find you again,
When arms entangle in passionate whispers,
Diluting the ancient brine of all losses,
I wish with all my heart that I could erase
One whole day, one wrong word, one moment,
To bring back the same shadows of real life,
That glowed in dark nights a long long time ago.
One small step would have changed time,
If only you with your pale cottons,
Turned back and listened to what strange tales,
Others couldn’t say for they never knew
The world you were to me,
In a sacred space that I call my soul,
Not yellow metals that still clink melodiously.
On books
Another major trend in the current academia is that literary theory is more important that literature itself. Since the second half of the twentieth century many theories have come into existence and they have replaced literature.What difference does it make to the reader to know that the writer was expressing his/her repressed thoughts through the use of a symbol in a poem under analysis? More than giving strange interpretations, what literature does is to change a perspective of life by providing a richer understanding of its mystery.
Simplify, simplify, simplify, said Thoreau. He was wise to know that most eloquent speeches were vacant of meaning or spirit. Many good writers write with a simple, unadorned style and it is not difficult to see the effort that has gone into developing such clear and lucid thinking. What I would like to know is how was your perspective changed on reading a particular book?
Déjà vu
Skeletons in the Cupboard
Home
Home is where your heart goes back time and again, where you want to spend your quality time enjoying the activities that you like. Home i...