A poem a day written in July 2014

8/12/2019 A poem a day written in July 2014

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The hibiscus

A poem a day written in July 2014

A.J.Rao


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Contents

The natural 1

Taut plot 2

Authentic holes 3

Flesh 4

Daydreams 5

Twilight 6

Praise 7

Back 8

Quarrels 9

Beating vision back 10

Bamboo 11

Trance 12

Lineaments 13

First things 14

Port of call 15

Disturbance in the west 16


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Blind words 17

Old woman 18

Braid 19

Permanent ink 20

Black buck 21

Nothing 22

Not seeing star or smelling lamp 23

Senses 24

Paddy 25

Bricks 26

Binary 27

Memory is to forget 28

Inside snake 29

The leaf fan 30


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1

The natural

we are natural and ones decaying,

beach boat disintegrating, a dusk

in the fatness of a body , our smile

we are children of ma fatly sitting

on her smile at our hands passing

how they were grubby below nails

but our nature ma is also her rage

swirling around the steadfast rockand going detour around a temple

it is she who bore us at new dawn

persisted with us in hills and moon

in a sky of white words like clouds

it is she who will change our skinsa slough we turn over to her rocks

so it will announce we once lived.

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2

Taut plot

One has no dreams in afternoons

Only daymares, belly fish of fears

Wrought into heavy-lidded sleep,

Mares ,not being equine animals

Of diurnal type but the belly ones

Where you enact fearful plotlines.

Caucasian doctor from anywhere

Appears by your side to diagnose

An unnoticed fleshly protuberanceOn neck, way to a two year death.

Story is scripted by a ghost writer

Of random ghoulish department.

Everything is random but stiched

Neatly together like by a pro hack,

A belly fear knotted to a taut plot.

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3

Authentic holes

Our words turn out to be authentic life

A breath not yet snapped,a wind going

In a mouth-hole, a water hole for eyes

A nosy hole to smell real world passing

A matter in nine holes, open to the sky.

Words are a world, in and out of breath

Authentic life, touchy-feely, eyes open.

All our words make some hole or other,

Poems most authentic holes made ever.

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4

Flesh

Flesh is word that came twice

And so willing, with weak spirit

One that trembled in windows

All those that held no July rain

On pots of earthly plants eager

In balcony for first nectar sips .

Thinking flesh trembles in fear

When it comes twice in search

For a word, death in the air likeDog flesh rotting on a highway

Fighting army of spirited flies.

The earthly plants have no flesh

Only spirit in the sap,our breath

From flesh that will rot like dog

On a highway fighting an armyOf August flies, a spirit in flesh.

In the third time, flesh is weak

But the spirit is strong in bark

A nights wail from weak flesh.

This time round spirit is willing.

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5

Daydreams

I have my daydreams in the night

Tucked under blanket full of sleep,

A tortoise carrying world on back.

My feet are gathered up in blanket

Into an earth-ball,a sphere like ice

Tingling palms like they were kids.

Umbrella is world shrunk to a cloth

A mosquito net all around my bodyIts mosquito rain kept away in buzz.

My daydreams are all about a night

When I shall have dreams in which

My free will scripts their plot lines.

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6

Twilight

Let us get down to business,we said

Promptly acknowledging the hour,

The crepuscle, so far away, yet near.

Our twilight blinks a transitory day

A moving shadow on a series of hills

Like overcast eagle looking for prey.

This is the time of cows return dust

The hoofs lightly askew in earth hourTo home, a night advancing in moon.

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7

Praise

This night holds no praise for us

But for a worlds past it holds up

All the candles , right up to a sky

What do we do, Rilke,but praise

Night after night for its curtains,

Anonymitys unnamed curtains

That exist side by side,with name,

Other dimensions, other branes

Not just brains that disappeared

Behind woolly containers, nights

Of two-dimensional plastic worlds

Of time ,beyond our eyes and kin.

Praise we do since we cant trust

Bodies,in their living discussions.Their eye holes will take in night

Like whoosh of the wind in skulls

After both stillness and wild fight

Know them like star and storm.

(Taking off on Rilkes poemO tell us what do you do..)

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8

Back

The young actress by her back

Announces style,like chocolate

In an advertisement ,in which

Surprise ice handfuls get flung

At lovers before chocolate bars.

They love bodies and chocolate.

We are the art lovers of cinema

Where a silence hangs heavily

Between speech bits and eyes.Our silence goes ice,when silver

And speech somewhat muddy

Like a stale death that is news.

Our backs are shiny with balms

We advertise for domestic love.

The womans eyes fall so softly,Her back between us and bones.

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9

Quarrels

We look back at those times

Filled with quarrels of house,

In arguments fine like pollen.

Now all that dust has settled,

As a fine flower dust of bees

Floating behind times walls,

These very bees are star dust

Making honey in night skies.

There were sounds in the roofThat rattled lizards from tiles

And some times brought out

Snakes coiled around beams

Pretending about quarrels,

As boy questions on snakes

At sleep, when they slithered.

We pretended to perfection.

We will pretend about them

As we will be dust in our sky.

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10

Beating vision back

Child is beaten in the flesh

Mostly to beat vision back

And in the ways of all flesh,

A world of dark blind men.

A teachers stentorian cane

Misses no flesh in the class

If it is from no money, all love.

There is flesh between kids

And a rhythmic fall of cane.

The school self-teaches flesh

A thing or two about money.

Canes teach kids love in flesh

A flowing river of their eyes.

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11

Bamboo

We see it as a passing shadow

A twist that soon straightens

To sing flute of balmier times.

We do not reckon persistence

Of shadows, darkest to pop up

Behind paled ones like waves

That come one after the other.

Supposing your bamboo stops

And there is a silence that fallsWill persistence pay dividends

Of white lights in incoming ship

Making its way in the dark sea?

Yes ,if you sing for ironic state

When there is neither bamboo

Nor fingers to play in the holes.

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12

Trance

Now I recall a goddess-trance ,

Dark woman falling on others

A fiery setting of yellow flame.

An old Irish poem talks about

A ill-tonsured saint, intoning

In front of a table, in front of

House,a saint double mapped.

Was he in holy ghost trance?

Trance is escape from placeA locus with no coordinates.

A double mapping in front of

A table in front of his house

Hardly makes history trance

Of shaved head, from the sea.

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13

Lineaments

Let us trace our lineaments

And find them the same as

Worlds that we have drawn

And poet discovered before

His own bucket was kicked,

His waters formed thin sliver

To disappear in the dry sun.

Lineaments are mine, yours,

The scratchy earth -globesA face that is soon laughter

Its eyes bottomless craters .

We whirl the globe and find

Lineaments much the same.

A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he

peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms,mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments,

stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he

discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the

lineaments of his own face. Afterword to El hacedor, 1960

Jorge Luis Borges

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14

First things

A sip of water is our breeze

A rain promise on stretcher,

Dog failing to bark at sleep,

A shadow curled as corner.

First things first ,not always.

Face book is dog of awaking,

Bark unfilled, shout unheard

A voice from fellow humans

Since embalmed in a desert.

Bodies are first things first

Minds pluralistic, politically.

Poetics is matter of rhyme,

Verbs felt missing a doing,

First things many times last.

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15

Port of call

There I saw she was a port of call

Content to be one , a grocery call

On way to home, beyond shadows

Of the earth line lying in snug sky.

Home is emotion thing,a warm bed

A nose-sneezing tissue for winters

Wrapped in polythene to put away,

A creaky bed,for nights of despair.

The home thing crackles with love,

Fiercely committed to body in love,

Body that sizzles and will be gone.

Why would one be home, she said.

A port of call recalls no ship names.

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16

Disturbance in the west

Due to el nino of weather these things

Shake our states ,from beings of light,

At night and other times of our sleep

On days when every poem goes awry,

A wind blows but no water to splurge.

There is yet an uprising of cloud fairy

From mountain distance,a wind speak

In trees , dancing their flowing hair

Dispelling birds from sleeping minds,A quiet hair,nested by night to dawn.

All this is in the eye of the Arabian sea

On the west, through the narrow pass

In the western mountains, where knots

Of lines swelled in our confused maps

Promising uprising but it was a fizzle.

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17

Blind words

Words came down desultorily

From vague and unknown sky

Like the police siren of a night

Competing for a sky with dogs,

Their barks piercing sleeps and

A night watchmans stick taps.

They came from prose space

Born from a Borges blindness

A night blind like Borges wild,A kings labyrinth on a desert.

Words are stars dropping dead

On the vastness of his desert.

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18

Old woman

She was the old woman of our age

As we hurtled towards our old age,

Her crinkle too young for our age.

Her body shook an entire laughter,

Acting life like it was no real thing.

An old woman of our essential age,

Her body wrinkled as if it laughed

Its guts out, emptying inner bags

Of its several childhood laughtersSpilling on the floor, rolling over

As inside-splitting ,old hag bodies

That had gone and to go hereafter.

(At the ripe age of 102 , the veteran actress Zohra Sehgalpassed

two days ago)

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19

Braid

Girls braid is a full-blown snake

Smelling fragrantly of jasmines

As it sits on a girls head within.

Girl goes to school unlike other

Who shimmies on airtight rope

For family stomach,on the road.

Girl braid is knotted in grandma

Mama wants cropped and gone.Girl braid is snake no one wants.

Braids and grandmas are dated.

Let them remain in the ant-hills

Under wild life protection laws.

(watching a Kannada film Moggina Jade)

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20

Permanent ink

We were born in the cloth, our valley

The sad tale of tears, of a lower pain.

Birth had nothing to do with erasure

When we would go breathless dying.

Really we are permanent ink, Indian.

We are sketches, thickened outlines,

Walking silhouettes at orange dusks.

Born in cloth we are permanent ink.

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21

Black buck

There they love their animals

Film stars no less, in a jungle.

When black buck dies by star

Arguments go by black gowns

About deaths entertainment,

Their cogency tested in silver,

In sweaty summer civil courts.

What shines is black and buck.

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22

Nothing

Nothing seemed a translation

Without an original, the poem

Unboxed without its contents

Its seamless thought packed

In memory words, a dialectic.

Who needs dialectic but poem

With no poet,making happen-

Who needs a poet,without life

Who needs life without poemWho needs poem but nothing.

Here we do with a translation

The poet making it all happen,

From nothing ,only empty air

But air is not nothing but life

Life at its breath and happenA translation without original.

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23

Not seeing star or smelling lamp

We found it was night again

As is always , to turn the day,

A shadow of house in space,

A space we may die to live in

Experience what it is to die.

A whistle from nights heart

A bark from the guts of dog

A creak from a whirring fan

Are nights signs of life likeThe lamp in its death throes,

Its oil a last breath of flame

Or faint Arundhati by night

Finger-pointed to new weds.

The dying do not see the star

Dimmer by bright neighbourNor smell dying oil of lamp.

One crosses life to see death.

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24

Senses

The rich paddy fields are country

With a woman under her goddess

Rising to hit bodies, passionately

Asleep in husbands lap, dreams

Troubling sleeping mind in body.

Five and country senses sharper,

I now try mindful of the country

Overgrown tree paradise staying

Spread as impressionist paintingBrush-strokes approximate truth.

Five senses are country and soul

That see everything, include ears

And beauty of a liberating smell,

Skin ex-foliated and sporting red.

Medicine for skin is a soul search.The heart is sensual as eyes break

A poet recalled, a beauty sonnet.

(Reference is to a Dylan Thomas poem When all my five and

country senses see)

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25

Paddy

We had gone in a mudtrack

Between the fields sporting

Paddy shoots in fresh slush.

Women feet were sure there.

There was rain on the night.

Women might have been there.

Their tongues might have rung

Like fevered bells in mouths

Singing their sowing songs.

Songs might have gone sad,

When skies were soon empty.

There was not enough slush

To go around for the paddy,

With common legs drowned

Not even up to their ankles.

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26

Bricks

By night bricks build on our hopes

To feed our desires on wet pillows

Soaked in dreams of rain coming.

No rain is no need for a noon snack

Under a scorched earth and onion

To go with a bowl of rice porridge,

Among the cotton soldiers of field

Imitating clouds barren with rain.

Bricks are way to build rain sheltersAbove us , when rain plays truant.

Our childrens feet play brick slush

And women hang babies by trees.

Our heads now bear blood-red bricks

Made of the same earth that used

To spring cotton like white clouds .

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27

Binary

The two-timing goes on by the man

With woman, exploring woman issue

In bitter pillow fights acted between

Woman carving existence for herself

And other, who has done it already.

There are no bad women,only other.

All that thing is man-woman in soap

A binary song ,two bodies in conflict.

Man of woman is at conflict with herBecause the woman wants that way

After a long haul of domestic chores

A bitch session about other women

Doing it,to forget the other conflict,

The twang of inherent male violence

Man staking claim to original home

A breakaway trying to enter her womb.

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28

Memory is to forget

Our forgetting is a purely digital thing

About having many gigabytes of cloud

A cloud not on our faces but on bodies

Like on far off hills under passing cloud.

The shreds do not rain at all, only cast

Their shadow for change and pass off.

On clear days, cloud memory is escape

From rain, from monsoon celebration

Shirking from responsibility for actionWhen the rain raga shall be overplayed

And the peacocks shall strut their stuff.

A vast memory is recipe for forgetting

A memory that stays all night in clouds

The tatters that pile up beyond the hills

But do not wet parched lands this side.

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29

Inside snake

We have always been afraid

Of snakes but are no longer.

We acutely worry about them

The ones inside us, endlessly,

Not ones roused from sleep.

About table ,where we are laid

Medicine phials are inside out

While a fans electric shadows

Stretch on the purest of walls,Like old snakes tongue probe.

We fear for our snakes safety

Laid end to end,geographically.

We love our snake much and

Want it back where it belongs.

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The leaf fan

Down from a palms tall frond

By a poor mans toddy descent

The leaf-fan stirs a wind about

Our faces that sweat and fret.

Hand fatigues of the same face

Not of the slave faces around

To catch the passing breezes

For a belle under fevered sky.

Man descends from the palm

With leaf for our ribbed fans

For our powerless afternoons.

His face is of erstwhile slaves.

His ribbed chest emits fumes

Of toddy liquor brought down.

(Reference is to John Gays poem The Fan)

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A poem a day written in July 2014