If you die , be simple poet.
Let the wild geese over-fly.
Now there is clear blue air
Whosoever you and I are.
These geese will fly home
And another night begins
And sea will send waves
Over the wild geese’ cries
With turtles ever hopeful,
To lay their eggs on shore
And deaths come in waves
And go away into the past.
(Poet Mary Oliver dies at the age of 83)
January ninth was a beginning
That recurs till all my years die.
And each of my years, I will die
And each time I die is doorway
And each time I lie is doorway
And it is tubes and a loss of air
In spite of everything, because
A tube sticks out from a belly.
(On the birthday of my son who passed a year ago)
I have read a poem by coal,
That smelt my own memory
Of earthen stoves smoking,
As a lazy city opens its eyes.
The poem is spoke by coal,
From black coal to diamond,
A diamond for ever in fever
Or black coal to white fame,
Depending on who pays what
And how much per molecule.
A coal poem has a black skin
But is a diamond at sunshine,
Especially, if sun’s rays crash
On window glass in diamond.
(After reading a poem COAL by Audre Lorde)
His face is marble with a cold eye,
Glaciated by the old age waterfall.
Wife’s eyes too are turned glacial,
By a winter’s fog, biting old body.
It is foggy at night in uncle’s eyes.
Wife eye has spread fog to world
From her cornea with dark hole,
We have to find a dead eye to fill.
Come after six months for review.
He says we will, if eyes are alive.
They talk in slow dreams on river
As the boatman shouts at evening
And shadows play in the banyan.
They forget the banyan is dream
And men shuffle about in dream
And boats bloat on river’s dream.
They forget theirs is asexual god
Dreaming as stone in a sanctum.
They forget they are but fragment
From a mother whose wholeness
Was lost to a fragmented memory
And only a cold river remembers.
He was a fallen star of dark night,
In silent fall, not crunch in snows.
Falling star makes no thud sound,
After the fall from grace and light.
A star fall is no big deal to a night,
Making no light nor sound to sky.
They are too many of them dead
And it is futile to search a debris.
She was chit of a girl, in pigtails,
With school bag on shirt’s back,
Her girl eyes underlined in black.
Her bag had poems to memorize
To recite in class between chairs,
Small hands tucked on her chest.
From chit she grew up to a book.
She no more spoke others’ verse.
She had many poems in her skull.
Muse tousled her hair with wind.
(Tribute to poet Meena Alaxander (1951-2018) , who passed a few days ago)
