Time and again

I was just asking time
Once again.
Because my words had fallen
Into night.
They were not luminous.
When Rilke dropped them
They were.
But they fell into the same
Aggregate of darkness.

autumn of poetry

arundhati stirs the leaves within me
like yesternight’s wind in the pipal tree
the leaves are yellow and ripe for falling.

(arundhati subramaniam’s poetry)

The train journey

There, in God’s country, the benign ruler
Had  burst out of the earth’s bowels
A sea of coconuts smothered, sultrily,
The most unwilling moss-painted houses
The banyan raised its feet high enough
For hundreds of  monsoon-creatures
The journey then began in white rain
Waiting for streaks of silver sunshine
To crawl through upright nut barks
As the telephone wires went up and down
A floating bird quickly froze in the sky
First the coconut fronds ran to the hills
Then the chilly plants went red in the face
The train went spluttering for lack of puffing
And gravelly stones hit its forbidden parts.

The hanging of a child-rapist

Darkness spread its wings
The walls were closing in;
Their pale textures merged
Into the corners of his mind.
The time has come to experience
Slow unfilling of space
Sudden ejection into Time.
Just like that little girl
Whose cries precipitated
His own descent into hell
On the other side of the glass wall
Her lips seem to be moving
He cannot read them, now,
The mists on the glass have thickened.

(Based upon the hanging incident of a youth from Kolkata who was condemned to to die for the offence of brutal rape and cold-blooded murder of a school-girl )

The skull-pot

I sit here on the precipice
With my feet dangling
In the abyss of time
On the far-line I espy
A pile of stacked skulls
Of large circular eyes
With the mountain air
Hissing through them.
These skulls had thoughts,
When their holes were eyes,
That wished no brains in them.
What did the old man think,
When , lying on a string cot,
He saw the smile of death
Where the banyan met the sky.

(Reference is to Pol Pot,the Cambodian dictator)

Our childhood home

We tried hard not to dream
While awake and in sleep
We leaned against the parapet
The shadows seemed to tease;
The sounds were unduly harsh
And the sights mere fragments.
Our dreams were a hotchpotch.
We could go back to  then space
But surely not that time-space
The subtle corners were there
But not those soft shadows;
Everything was not the same.

Love on the beach

I  sense the tingle of your fingers
On the shadowy curve of my back
Through their after-fragrance.
You ran your fingers on my belly
I could almost hear their music.
I could hear your carbon smell
As the sun burnt your crackling back
And we lay, on the beach, oblivious
Of the crustaceans crawling around us.

The death of a woman

She stared at the wooden beam
The wood that was once a tree
A tailless lizard came from
Behind the wooden beam and looked
At her for the seventeenth time
kitta kitta kitta said the lizard
She who had become ‘it’ stared
Unremittingly at the wooden beam
At the beam that was once a tree
The beam looked at the tailless lizard
The continuum flowed endlessly .

The struggle

Things happened very fast.
The body quickly gave way;
The sanitized walls closed in.
The lone crab struggled
In a puddle of scalding water
There were voices around
All happened in a split-second
When someone shouted
Pull him out, for God’s sake;
This is a mere dream.

Tales of the Sculptures-In the Krishnapuram temple

The monk grinned  from ear to ear
As the celebration went on endlessly
There was no end , only a beginning
There was a twinkle in lotus-eyes
And a mere flutter of her eyelids.
So many bones , so much dust.
The monk celebrated her transience
Laughing at the ephemeral reality
That began as a mere idea
In the artist’s chaotic mind.
The artist’s power did not matter.
The princess’s love did not matter.
The laughter began the end.