Old photograph creatures

The brows touch and in the eyes
A dream,  a youthful filial dream

By a poet who searched dreams
In vintage photograph creatures

Like the spirit who sang for you
To disappear , be gone for ever

Singing of pearls that were eyes
Of dreams that made his pearls

Five thousand rupees for string,
In  pearls bazaar of four towers

Far from oyster hosting oceans.
We are looking for dream dads

Without mustaches, their brows
Not touching, knit in a thought

In the pearls that were the eyes,
Found in photograph creatures.

Smoke of meaning

The poet says ,we are custodians
Of life’s meaning,freed from past

A trusteeship writ in  dusty deed
As God’s camera flashes up there.

In reality ,God’s day light clothes
Hang there to dry  and  they drip

Like balcony roses holding pearls
Of an early morning rain and fog.

Trouble is we are always haunted
By bells sound, somewhat smelly

Like they ring from  garbage van.
The bells ring for all in our creed.

And god, what smell to our nose!
The creed is the garbage dumped

To yard where it burns to smoke.
Meaning is a self-congratulatory

Facebook message going up like
Garbage smoke, beyond the lake.

Morning on the river steps

River steps turn wet with village women’s baths.
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.

Continuum

We hold her lukewarm hands
Not acknowledging our touch.

In inner life ,ancient memory
May be rushing like sea wave

In the continuum of ancestors
Who had left home’s comfort

From entity to non-existence
From pinch of skin to dream.

It was they who turned crows
And now visit us for rice ball.

Turns of phrase

We are these days happy with a new door
A  mauve hue on baths, while on our song,

With shower flowering on our cool backs
Streaming as if from rock skirted by trees

Its vapors swirling like the winter breath.
The song is under breath, in some mutter.

The vapors are a glass that hides a smoke
Our rather banal faces, in jejune laughter.

We are, in fact, searching our metaphors,
Upbeat about our recent turns of phrase.

Sexton is wordless poet

A pastor lives in winter light
Like one in chess with death.

This morning, Sexton is poet
Who wrote about stone boat

Her dear friend Plath is rival
Both in love and a stone boat

Her poetry is  stone to death
As  Sexton who will ring bell

And dig graves to perfection
To drown a boat, wordlessly.

(after watching the movie Winter Light by Ingmar Bergman and recalling a common death theme running in poetries of Anne Sexton and her friend and fellow poet Sylvia Plath)

Examined life

Socrates is not an unsociable jerk
But only finding life worth living

As bearded philosopher of a wife
About to sprinkle her dirty water

On beards quivering for meaning.
We have to find a meaning in pigs

Grunting in sandwiches, forming
Lumps in philosophical throat of

Inquiry, find meaning in pig’s life
Nor historiography of eating pigs

Or justifications rooted in nature
In a convoluted evolution theory.

We wonder if this   examined life
Is worth all this time,what we do

Behind all this,with smelly bones
At the bottom end of such inquiry.

Who we are

This ,we will  know in the morning
After the birds wake up to the song

Left over of yesterday’s tree music
Day before yesterday and the birds.

Other who we are, we come to hear.
Other who they are ,we shall know.

Primarily ,we wake up to birdsong
Or a  god-song over east reddening

If we are still found short of breath
We resort to finery of a bird’s nest

Atop air-conditioner unit,the chick
Lying dead on dawn’s potted plant

After night’s music was lately over.
We come over to the birds’  finesse

In babble on internet wire at dawn
Other who they are , we shall know.

Cry

Words are cry baby’s laughing waters
Streaming from its  eyes without hurt .

You do not remember whenever a last
Laugh occurred and cry turned about

In syllables, like glistening pearl-drops
Of words slow forming like night dew.

The eyes will laugh like the primal cry
In a deep belly where it had hurt softly

In the sense making effort, of the world
Dying gradually from the absurd effort.

Cry from stomach is your wasted effort
At collecting lung air and making sense

Of chaotic world, with a mother to die,
To cry for and about, to mourn in early.

Eye of the needle

The tailor had an eye for his needle
That went in and out of cotton hole

As if it was his very own heart lung
Furiously beating in an old rib cage.

His needle had an eye for a thread
That went like it was a Bible camel.

Diwali is closing in with customers.
The needle has a catching up to do.