You

When this man too left
crouched like a monkey
in the indignity of death
and carried away to be eternized,
you resurfaced as usual
not because the bells of death
which had once put you to sleep
has now chimed life into your remains
but because with this man’s flesh too
I had once moulded the scar on your right elbow,
with this man’s hair too
I had once painted your pubescent moustache,
and from this man’s loins too
I had conjured up Zarathustras,
your sons and grandsons,
worthy of wars, horses and women.

Cranes

When I come to that mood called life
from the squeaky pathetic robot that I am turned into
I pity myself for not touching your fingers
when they were still resting on the handrails,
before they flew away as cranes into the crimson evening.

I could have crouched behind the blackened iron rails
and watch you fly to the Americas
but I was weak enough to turn my eyes
into two pieces of little lenses.

With those magnifying glasses I wandered gathering insects
and in my nights I dissected them to see their entrails
and in my days I fixed them with pins in glass cases
and my hands which were so close to yours once
are now nothing but steely forceps of sickening smells.

Rebirth

Inside, a new life is born.
Some unknown fear shed
some unshed tears blossom.

After a poem, a drizzle,
a cremation.

The freshness of every instant
As known by the pristine Buddha.

Two Acts

Act 1

I was lying down on the sofa waiting for daybreak. I was sleeping and I was seeing everything through that sleep.

In that sleep I was thinking with clarity. But I did not think of him. I thought only of his body, wrapped up in the shroud and lying on the table. As if awaiting autopsy.

I waited not only for sunrise, but for something else too.

Act 2

“And you left me alone with him”. She was on the verge of tears.

She could have as well put it this way – “And you left me alone with his body”.

As if she doesn’t know my inability to love.

Art

On my way to office
I saw something on the pavement today.
It showed life’s paradoxes better than any novelist.
It wept life’s sad-happinesses better than any poet.

It was art born from earth’s fertile concrete womb;
no art had ever been this true, this complete.

And as usual with such things, it vanished the moment I recognized it.

Forever Now

This moment is all the moments before now and all that are after now.

I am a cartwheel's that speck which always touches the earth
or always that grain of soil which touches the cart.

I am this now which is the time of my grandfather
watching my father bathe in the pond of eternal youth
which is also the time of my grandson watching his
grandson bathe in the same golden pond.

I am an enormous wave that rise and fall - unseen and unheard -
in near total solitude, somewhere far south in the Indian Ocean.
In the gasping expanse of that ocean I happen only once
and beneath me I hold its waters together forever.

Towards my left or right I do not see anything
because I am that jewel to which the ring converges
and for the sake of which all that metal is cast.

If I were a painter

If I were a painter I would have painted
those two curls of hair drooping across your forehead
and half covering your downward looking eyes.

I would have given the shade of a night's black to your eyes
and that of an elephant's black to your curls.
For your brows I would char a tree and use that black.

I would paint only the curls, your brows and your eyes
and not your face or even your lips
because I don't want to be the stone on which you are etched.

I want to keep the curls falling forever,
to be the cupped palms into which honey is poured forever
and from which it leaks forever.