Short poems about a moment or an object
In river city, you go to die,
You stand in the cold river.
You shiver in wet clothes
To take God’s name truth.
Lips mutter like butterflies
Fluttering on yellow flower
And river drips like sweat.
You shiver in your clothes
Till you wear the marigolds
To take God’s name’s truth.
(It is believed that those who die in the holy city of Varanasi will attain salvation and become free from the cycle of births and deaths)
Announcing terminal to board
To report at Gate no 87 please .
Angels are at a white attention.
A white plane arrives any time.
No need to check in a baggage,
They are angels to take charge.
We will await at the gate no 87,
Our boarding pass ready to go.
(A lady diagnosed with terminal cancer at 87 decides to die with dignity without undergoing painful therapy suggested by doctors)
We have landed in a structure
With lines of iambic tetrameter
Which wander night’s wastes
As a sea breaks its waves in it
Sea accepts no wave patterns
Keeping right to alter anytime.
So we have changed our lines
Up and down like sea’s waves.
Let aubade be aubade like
A Larkin ,a fear put to rest
With morning raga on lips
Before a daily sun’s larking.
Let breeze blow sun on sea
And the sea sink its larking
As if sun wakes a mid night
And starts a daily business.
Clouds are somewhat a poet’s dream
A colonial poet spreads under a girl,
And requests she tread a little softly.
She is treading on his private dream.
They are not actual heaven’s clothes
But look poor imitations by plastics.
But look close enough at our clouds.
They are our cotton farmers dreams
Rain and money lenders tread upon.
They are in-process cotton suicides.
(Scores of cotton farmers commit suicides , due to heavy debt burden incurred after three successive monsoon failures)
My ancestors in the port town
Were famous gold importers.
Gold was regularly glittering
By sun that went behind hills.
He was present sun’s famous
Ancestor who would set later.
He was sun who rose to fame
As who could glitter anything.
Those days he was so famous.
All that he glittered was gold.
There it was waters all -around
Behind my mother’s salty tears.
Later, I would be matter outside
Carrying seventy percent water.
I would dig a beach for waters
For beach-house I would build
On sand, rising high into a sky.
Now old,my eyes dig in the sea
Where a life’s aqua has flowed
Leaving dry river bed behind.
