The unblinking Jupiter sulks in the pearly grandeur of the night sky. There is moonness on the petals of tree jasmines and oleanders, deep in the seed sac of the flowers where jewels of light wait to be sexed by the inebriated nocturnal insects. I carry home wild flowers and leave them in my room.
Deep darkness of night
in sprigs of flowers from garden
the moon has blossomed.
Big Tent Poetry ( Write a Haibun)
Haiku My Heart Friday
from Recuerda Mi Corazon
Down the trail between dark casuarina trees
I walked, hair a coil of night flowers,
I took you through the nocturnal fragrance and said
fear not what the darkness can do to you.
You walked your iris dilated like a cat’s:
life lies not only in sunshine meadows.
I collect the debris in the hem of my skirt:
stones, glass, clay – they fit into my frame.
Stones go to make the backbone,
one below the other like the cobbled path in the garden;
ash settles in the crevices, blown from the sea
where death remains docked; smoke like clouds,
evidence of dissolution, fills the nose and eyes;
swarm of desires embellished by answers unsought
crumbles, turns powder in my hands.
Then the child that I bore in the silence of my self
lights the flame and pours clarified butter,
priest chants of things temporary that unmake the universe.
(To know the meaning of the Sanskrit word ‘Mithyā’ please go here and here.
To understand the Sankrit word ‘Mithyā’ as it occurs in the Vedanta go here.)
Haiku My Heart Friday
from Recuerda Mi Corazon
Leave my door open just a crack,
a needle eye for the silk thread of dawn
like jade dull and clouded to slant in. Darkness
end to end on the wall of my insides
stir milky and turbid as I sit at my table with tea.
Melancholy like fish gasps, gulping nuggets of grey:
foolishly preying while it perishes.
Fist ball of pearly light rolls under my feet,
petrified at the blessing that falls on my lap
I put away my cup.
The first line of the poem is borrowed from ‘Fireflies’ by Owl City.
Listen to the beautiful song here.
We Write Poems
Walls of moonbeams hide the silver threads of age,
crystal of pain like amber in the night glows;
she throws the stone at me, walks away without looking back –
her beautiful hair a cascade of quartz on a silted river bed.
Threads weave dreams of colour
from where the butterfly bursts forth dipping its wings.
Earth opens and I breathe beauty in the knotted river of lava
while my lacy wings get incinerated. There,
I am now a wingless insect. Still, let me tell you
I will not give my all to you.
(Process notes: Three things that I want to tell of myself –
I am of this earth.
I breathe beauty.
I will not give my all to you.
The rest gets veiled in images.)
I chuted through the passage of time
uncreased the wrinkles and looked into the aqua pool of her skin.
The rogue gene swam up through the lucent underwater
billowing, looping squiggles of murk,
to leave blemishes on her soul.
I held her hand, walked her to the dying Buddha
whose face had immense silence on it:
words die when they find no speaker.
Camel coloured void swept us as his breath like vapor escaped,
smile still on the face, eyes fixed on us.
Vicinity dropped in the desert of grief,
dunes of worry-lines swallowed our path.
I held her hand and we walked
days, days, days.
A childlike curiosity lighted her sand encrusted eyes
as she examined the veins on the pebbles
we picked from a gravel river bed where water dried years ago.
The furrowed strand fought against the loam the wind carried,
it wound into the sky. We stepped into this ribbon of memory
and walked there, carrying pebbles to gather weight
and leave our footprints.
Process notes: I am reading Colin Thubron’s wonderful book ‘Shadow of the Silk Road’. Through the week I collected words from this book. They are – rogue gene, looping, murk, gulped, billowing, aqua, dying Buddha, lucent, hood, crumple, umblemished, cameI coloured void. I stayed with these words for a day and cleared time to write, hoping that nothing that is happening in my life at this point of time (my old parents-in-law who stay with me have been very sick and I have been spending considerable amount of time the last few months taking care of them) would influence what path these words take. I started to write and realised when I was done that words picked at random for their beauty and exclusivity, stay very close to what is happening in me. Also, I think I have repeatedly used the image of the desert because I am inspired by Colin’s evocative description of the Gobi desert on his journey through the Silk Route.
Big Tent Poetry
Haiku My Heart Friday
from Recuerda Mi Corazon
My Garden 