Ratnarao’s short verse

She rests a hand on a wobbly knee

Her bones could be heard creaking

What can she do but move with

So much exciting shopping to do.

There had got to be something

Beneath all this big movement

And umpteen noises in the vessels.

We thought deep-set irony was all-present

A smirk, a delicious wink, long strides

In green spaces towards empty buildings

As though it was all settled.

That was not. Even their irony lacked.

Absence did not matter. Nor being.

We smacked lips for nothing.

A pair of his trousers

Continued to dry

Against the blue sky

For the third day.

actually time sleeps at night

while cities sleep in daytime

but their sleep gently touches

us in the evening as stale jasmines

remembered in time’s sleep

their sleep is in opaque eyes

hidden in women’s shadows

which get up and go after dusk.

Movement marks the birds

from the pines

In Vikram Seth’s evening.

In my midnight

The birds are sleeping.

The whirring fan is my bird

my thought, my fear

The fan marks my fear

From the silence of the night.

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.

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)

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.

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 )

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)