Winter bliss

That is when a victory music comes in waves
From boxes, in parallel and standing towers
Their faces black and square and facing trees
And clouds in sedation with solar necklaces
On chests, breathing out rings of winter steam.

That is when a river shivers on its silken sands
On a cold morning under a train on the bridge
With tiny ants of people crawling on its wet bed
Around sand craters, along with toy buffaloes.

That is when cloaked people huddle around fires
Fed on twigs and old tires burning in acrid smoke,
When shadows from sun are pinioned on the wall
And palms emerge from cloaks for re-assurance.

Haiku and short verse

Monkeying at sun

Kid in monkey cap
Monkey-claps at rising
Winter sun.

Smoke signals to sun

Man in lungi
Sends smoke rings to sun
Winter is already here.

Baptism by fire

Baptist church there says
Bear fruits of repentance
Look at the red fruit in sky.

Monsoon woes

The mongrel wags tail
Not at the candy-man
But on monsoon flies.

Moon thoughts

At seven,we thought we had seen the moon
From the roof, in the waving coconut leaves.
Actually the chair we sat on was a blue moon
Inciting these moon thoughts in early nights.
In point of fact the moon was just a light bulb
Lying on the distant roof, beyond the station.

Every coconut has to have a moon in its fate.
You see the moon happens as an appendage
To our coconut trees, mostly, in early nights.
On a rain less night the moon rises over them
As a beauty-flower in their hair in a dark sky.

At times moons are mere light bulbs hovering
On rooftops,peacefully existing with coconuts.
When they are moons, not dim-wit light bulbs
They may be broken with some moon missing.
But they always stand by the listless coconuts
Encouraging them with a characteristic cool.

River steps

River steps are wet with village women’s baths.
A golden sunlight floods their mornings in boats
Leaving early for mountains on wrinkled rivers.
Giant banyans greet them from the other bank
Spreading their shadows of hair on the blue sky.

Mornings are for sun, palms cupped with water
Looking the sun in the eye, lips softly trembling
With prayers, as white wet clothes cling to body.

On the river bed, the buffaloes bath in shallows,
Unperturbed by the sun flashing in vacant eyes,
Like little rocks in the bed laid smooth and bare
By a dried up river, after last year’s flash floods.

Rain

Rain in the afternoon makes less noise
On a napping mind, more on a dulled skin
The way it tickles it by the wind from trees
And comes in instalments like crow-caws
And rice poundings in neighbour houses.

Half -awake eyes are shut in old thoughts
As certain rain of day and sun on the side,
Rain and sun married like dogs and foxes.
It is at leaf-ends that rain-magic happens.
The sun trains a flashing mirror into room
Way past gaps in curtains, on to the wall.

Who started the wind?

In the river, you look up from the waters,
And see the wind walking down calmly
From the hills that have holes at the top.

On your feet, if joined in a lotus posture
At the river’s bottom, the wind will push
Through currents smelling of the far hills.
Your face can smell the wind in the river
Where it touches your cheeks, in caress.

Surely the trees have not started the wind.
The trees just shake as though they did it.
It is not even a sea of giant rolling waves.
Those just pretend they brought it about.

It seems the wind comes from upstream
Riding down to the sea on the river’s back.
The sea hosts the wind from all the hills.
Who originated the wind is now answered
Finally and without equivocation, after all.

Larvae

From trees, on a gentle wind from the hills
A new light shall fall on the fluff of marigold
Its petals scattered for bees to tempt smells
On antenna of viscous honey, pollen of love.

The larvae are growing as luminescent dust
In beams of light that travel down from the roof
In chinks of old tiles, awaiting their change
After the moss turns on them black in sun
When new tiles will replace them, by workers
Sitting on the roof as if they are sky-birds.

The larvae are growing in white water- clouds
Hoarding river and sea for tomorrow’s festival
When they will be beating tin-roofs like drums
Pushing dried flowers down their corrugations
And send down snakes of water to our ground.

Of light dust and snowflakes the larvae will grow
Till evening when they will vanish in our pages.

The brick wall

What came to the mind was a mere brick wall
In several squares of thought, a soft wind
Buffeting the creepers flying on its holes
And moss of history faded into black night.
The busy brown ants were not left far behind.
If it was words of bricks we might build it
In its brown brokenness,on music of thought.

A bird visitor would come in brown stripes
Its fickle screw-head moving in sky for worms.
The creeper strutted in the sun its proud stuff
Of flowers of paper hanging in leaves in pink.
It was not a mere brick wall, but a broken wall
Of holes that hid childhood, my lost years.

The lake that was sea

The lake went unnecessarily emotional
In the shadows of the banyan and men
Sitting on the rails of its embankment
Who looked like birds flying on the sea.
Its ripples pretended to be ocean-waves.
The trees waved knowingly on the rim
Their green hairs eating up the blue sky.

We fished for hidden grandma stories.
An auntie lent her gold in a cloth bundle.
You need jewels, you jewels of women?
Come to the lake and ask the lake auntie
Who will lend hers to you for wedding.
Remember to return them when done.

You, betrayer, have not returned them?
She is no more a jewel lending auntie.
You can hear her sad silence in ripples .

(The myth relates to the Ramappa lake , a 800-year old lake near Warrangal in Andhra Pradesh that has remained a part of the collective conscious of the people through such interesting myths and folk lore in circulation in the area)

The first flower

The first flower is fixed in my sky, waving in wind.
Its white fragrance is mine alone in its blue space,
The wind I do not own, but here this balcony I own
In bricks and cement, in sand from the river’s holes.

The flower is mine for claim to neighbors
And the squirrel that passes by, whoever.
When it dies and falls, I alone shall mourn.