awakening

Humming kettles. Furiously bubbling caffeine. Creaking cots whence escape hushed reminders of the night.Gushing faucets. Kitchens that erupt, sizzle, fume, fuss. Urgent voices. Cacophonies of the world outside. Beckoning gods. Beseeching wealth. Amidst it all, the silence of the breaking sky. Awakening of a different kind.


originally written for an online submission. sometime in 2009. one of my first prose poems.

pledge

he feels the earth beneath his feet,
picks up the broken lumps
and sieves it through his hands,
she smells of freshly turned soil
vestiges of fallen leaves.
she brings alive the stories
of countless miniature beings
that have made their homes in her.

He holds her close to his face,
And she talks to him,
Like a long-lost friend.

She tells him of the days
when he played on her as a small child,
Helping his mother pull out weeds,
With his clumsy, little hands.
She shows him the new pair of shorts
that her rich crop bought his father,
She weeps as she reminds him of
a large corner of her being sacrificed,
To the pawn broker,
who later became the keeper
Of his mother’s gold, and their home.
She shows him her barren womb
year after year
And how more of her disappeared.

And then, she is silent.
For the time has come
When he must leave her.
Forever.
There is no reproach in her.
Just sadness. And silence.
For despite all that she gave him,
he has pledged her all,
for a computer education
For his son.

He holds her once more,
Close to his heart.
And breaks down,
weeping like a child.
She smells of him,
his father and his grandfather,
And yet, he has no choice,
But to surrender an unforgettable past
To an unknown future.

there's fame. and there's fulfillment.

The giant waves leave nothing
Nothing to chance.
Lives, boats, even memories are gone.
And as the people gather around
The many graves of loss,
They just stare. For even their tears
Lie lost, buried amongst remnants in the sand.

The rescuers arrive,
Their earnest pride, masked under thin gauze strips
To prevent the stench of death
From entering their memories.
At first, they are shocked,
Looking at the half naked limbs, severed
By the might of the waves,
Orphaned like garbage heaps.
By the end of the day,
Tragedies turn to statistics
In the notebooks of the rescuers.

And then they come, men in suits,
In luxury cars and lapel pins that announce
The might of their being.
They sanction lakhs, draw blueprints,
Smile in benevolent grace,
At photographers flashing the headlines
Of the morrow.
They disappear, as quickly as they arrive,
Just like those giant waves.

The donations will now be watched over
By self appointed altruists
Whose altruism is directed at few
But themselves.

The real ones who stay to help
Will have to fight hurdles every where,
For trust in the times of strife
Is as abandoned as hope.

But these martyrs will stay,
Rebuild lives until one day,
They become nameless graves
Themselves.

But what will stand is the generous gifts
Of those men in cars and badges on their lapels.
Articles in papers, interviews on TV.
Always preserved in files and families.

The real martyrs and the rescuers
Will become mere memory,
Lost in the sweat and toil
Of the rebuilt land.

look up, just once

Remember the time
When we could count them,
Connect the twinkles
In the sky,
Sitting pretty
Against the cloudless
Backdrop of the night?

We search now
And then,
Among the hazy smears
That we have scorched
Into the skies.
The murky canvas that proclaims
Our progress
Has but blinded us all.

A few years hence,
They will all be gone,
Most of them, unnoticed
For we would have been
Too wrapped in our world,
And warped in our worries
To look up at them.
To look up to them.


So we’ll paint constellations
On our indoor ceilings,
Lest we forget they existed at all.

But before they disappear
From our eyes,
Just look up once, every night,
Because once they are gone,
How will we teach our
Future to
Reach for the stars
At all?



September 2011 - after i tried in vain to show the kids some constellations up in the sky and was shocked at finding just some hazy speckles

haiku

barren, brown and parched,
they stand. bereft of any life,
no leaves, just dead roots.


written now. in the moment.

Listen to her cry (double nonet)

She
carries
Beauty in
Myriad forms
Each, a miracle
He nips them in the bud,
One by one until they bleed;
They surrender to feed his greed
She cries a silent tear; in vain.

He snuffs her pain until tears dry,
She rages, rants and pleads him so,
Yet his lust overpowers,
He erases traces
Of each miracle
'Til none remain
to feed him
Hear him
Cry.


written on 22.4.2008