Hope Is The Thing With Feathers
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
Emily Dickinson
The first rain dissolves time
slipping to the dark afternoon that many years ago
the moment lost in the crevices of memory.
I sat in my room
lit by the phosphorous sky of lightening
reading Ezra Pound.
Dark runnel of water
flowed under my window,
the mango tree creaked with dampness
sighing wearily with years of barrenness.
Gloom curled in the corners of my room
my mind was fatigued searching the seed of desolation.
How Blue Was The Sky When He Looked Up
The boy skips
several times to the window
peeps impatiently
holding the rusted bars
looking for his mother.
Will she wear a sari today
he fears the ridges of frown on Dikshitar’s face
seeing his mother dressed inappropriately for the visit
a strand of jasmines falling over her dark neck
a stole thrown hurriedly over her shoulder.
He has packed his cloth bag
there is nothing much in it
nothing that he wants to carry
from the dingy corner of the room
that he shares with ten others in Patashalai.
He is allowed to wear a shirt today
buttoned all wrong he runs
hearing his mother’s loud voice
her laughter rings through the dark passage
as she greets the Dikshitar.
She is wearing a denim pant, long kurta
and a fuzzy thing for a stole
her hair black, ripples of curls
is bunched with a yellow band
she has painted her fingers red.
She fusses, she buzzes
as she buttons his shirt, wipes his face,
combs his hair
holding his jaws forcefully
till he screams loudly with pain.
She smiles, bends down and whispers
- for five days no veshti
only pants, jeans and shorts
looks conspiratorially at the old Dikshitar
in whose face runs streams of disapproval.
The boy of eleven, in his mind
screams for tact from his mother
-I have to come back here
my friends are watching
he pleads with his eyes to his unseeing mother.
She takes him to her one room tenement
stowed away on an old building
the heat pours through asbestos roof
the walls a garish blue floats like clear afternoon sky
as he lies on the floor swept clean by his mother.
The small place is stacked with things
a fridge murmurs softly
a TV stands on a rickety stool
heap of clothes on a steel chair
rotten bananas in a plastic bowl.
She has been collecting things
buying on credit, acquiring by charity
appliances discarded by people she knows
a little wire fitted here, a tinkering there
things for her son to use when he grows up.
For now
he is a boy of eleven
learning vedam in Patashalai
his mother is single
a cook from Kumbakonam.
the bowl of land scooped by the hills;
chillness settles on leaves and flowers
that smudge and blur in twilight haze;
funnel of clouds washes the sky
to drain into the horizon;
the moon a dull disk of gloom
waits for darkness
to dazzle the knots of rocks in silver.
He hates me
punches me hard in the
space in my head.
My stomach crumbles in fear as
he comes again and again
to nullify the simple world I’ve built.
Memories of blithe sunny afternoons
glow warmly;
wood smoke from the backyard
distilled through the dew of the winter mornings
smarts the eyes even now -
years after the house has fallen
and the people I shared life with have died.
Petals
Life is a stream
On which we strew
Petal by petal the flower of our heart;
The end lost in dream,
They float past our view,
We only watch their glad, early start.
Freighted with hope,
Crimsoned with joy,
We scatter the leaves of our opening rose;
Their widening scope,
Their distant employ,
We never shall know. And the stream as it flows
Sweeps them away,
Each one is gone
Ever beyond into infinite ways.
We alone stay
While years hurry on,
The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.
Amy Lowell
I am tipped into eternity
those who walled me in have floated away.
I scramble at memories
from sinking into the desert sand -
the whisper of mortality.
