A poem a day written in June 2014

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

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The hibiscus

A poem a day

A.J.Rao


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Contents

Chariot day 1

Back 2

Making home 3

Nostalgia 4

Garden 5

The fall 7

Fool-proof 9

Shadows 10

R.I.P. 11

Layers 12

Lake 14

sleep 15

Birds eye views 16

The painted sun 17

Fathers day 18

Phone noise 19


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Out of doors 20

Body still 21

Wet blanket 22

Short stories 23

The lock-keepers privilege 24

Train journey 25

Each body 27

Just one years rain 28

Remains 29

City sky 30

In a manner of speaking 31

Private rain 32

Last rains frogs 33


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1

Chariot day

It would rain on this chariot day

And gods went out yearly riding.

Their wood is the nature of things

The very tribal jungle from where

We had come,from our ancestors.

Their chariot will roll on our lives

The way towards ancient dreams.

We love to die under its wheels

We had lovingly made all of rainFrom jungle wood recently dead.

We shall some day burn as wood,

Our ashes lighted by their smiles.

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2

Back

The ravine it would easily sink

Wavering trees and dried grasses.

The morning is its orange sorrow

Delineated with the downy fingers

And you reach the end of sound

As you do on a spiked pipal leaf .

A hair creeps like your darkness

Down your fingers for silk touch,

The birds bleary eyed rain criesEchoed in a knotted end of cloud.

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3

Making home

We make this extended home ,

Immensely compressed space,

A light rolled in endless carpet

A shadow infinitely multiplied,

The poetics of our home space.

Dust atoms descend a skylight

In tiny suns creating our space

Expanding our eyes everywhere,

Corners puffing like dream catsThat self-destruct behind doors.

Doors are brooms to sweep light

Off its shadows and shadows fall

In abyss of light from a balcony

To come back for ripe apple sun

To live a world and die by moon.

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4

Nostalgia

With some more years before

Fading pearls of eyes,old man

Easily traverses memory lane,

A dusty lane of a quilted street,

In sleepy hollows of a rag bed.

A rag bed shall invoke pleasant

Would-have-beens, challenges

At a summit top of endeavour,

The red fluttering rag one hadSunk in snowy conquests peak

On path strewn with hangings.

Such is power of rags of words

Thrown at the winds at random

That they turn acted out events

To be nostalgic about some day.

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5

Garden

Garden is a fragrance remembered,

Soft grass crawling with slow snail,

Birds singing of changing the world

While I was at the computer trying

To change it before the cuckoo did.

Garden is a wood tree standing erect

As if it was alive and pretending life,

Hosting evening birds chatting away

With slum kids playing street cricket.

Fence is a running shadow of bush,

Hiding controverting garden lizard

That had agreed with your nothing

As it vigorously waved vertical head

To every polemic from your poetry.

The spider is your worlds wide web

That collected seasons rain pearls

Sparkling for proud sun moments

But gone when you returned from

An olfactory inspection of jasmines.

Garden is mama reading in a swing

From lifes pages that would be ice,

A fires ashes and a rivers waters,

A deaths fragrance remembered.


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7

The fall

this fat lady is of the fall

in the dark Kolkata night

of uncle no more in air.

the fall could have been

branch -arresting, if only

there were tree between

balcony and an earth ma.

It is the telephone wires

that did it- arresting bitthe fall went on,unfailing

the way to mother earth

on the pavement where

a mother earth smelled

a garbage of old lettuces

for dogs boys to scrounge

at break of smoked dawn.

the falling lady goes on

with her daily business

her childrens marriages

the duties of a grandma

she owes to an earth ma.

about bones life flowed

blood flowed to gravity

but fall goes on in body,

the stuff of her dreams

and in my own dreams


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8

an image of endless fall.

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10

Shadows

Please reflect how a light source

Casts its own shadow on the wall

Crawling in lizards food waiting

To cast its own briefest shadows .

A lantern waved shadows in wind

On the mud wall ,then something

That made the sum of all its parts

For a child of a nights landscape

A child who grew todays old man

Who carries all those emptinessesA shadow that carries all shadows

As if shadows are only real things.

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11

R.I.P.

Sleeps eyes now pray for souls

All goat souls on move , those

That body-hang on the lakeside

For Saturday dinner, the goats

That have no independent souls

To rest in peace , with no words

To compensate for loss of body.

Diners have souls , their bodies

Living on hanging goat bodiesThat have no independent souls

Stirring a mild lakeside breeze.

The dinerss souls rest in peace

As many words for bodies lost.

Only souls rest that have words

To stuff all those empty spaces.

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12

Layers

There was the rattle of the machine

And a vigorous thump,on its flanks

Another noisy night thump to quiet

The dusty cooling fan inside C.P.U.

Letters separated by layers of dust.

They fly away, keep them together

With full stops between the letters.

Water drunk by lips from a red bottle

Moistens F.S.I. fears of bought flats,A cooled stomach is little for tattle,

The bottle is down with a neck hole

The semi-circular hole for a sipping

Like a semicircular moon in balcony

With a night wind quietly humming.

The night watchmans whistle bores

A semi-circular hole in the midnight.

Now is pressure on top of a prostate

Falling for a leak, like expected cloud

In monsoon any time coming but not,

Satirical about a swollen strawberry

Lightly woken from sleep for poetry

A he he is about old mans love life

Come to ceasura, a vigorous thump

Administered yields no love results ,

Punctuation gone through a window.

Poetry is still left in a nights layers


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13

When peeled like tearful onion rings

Nothing at the core,only an absence,

A silence between the layers of dust.

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14

Lake

The lake was different by rusty sluice gates

And shore trees steadfast and light waving

And we sat on the parapet with hair flying

And a photograph made the day with lake

In a frame of time in space, in the married

Space of a son and dreams of his new wife.

It has now pushed far behind ,a tiny sachet

That glistened in afternoon sun like plastic

A ribbon of waters rippled by gentle breezeMildly perfumed by an incoming monsoon.

And the monsoon would seem so far away

Tantalisingly out of grasp for a citys thirst

In the lakes dwindling bowl turned brown

With its earth bed crackling,fish long gone.

(The Hussainsagar lake in Hyderabad)

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16

Birds eye views

An august wind is rocked

To its sleep by a sea wave

Around green rock cradles.

In June the rain brings it

From the hills of the sea.

The sea has hills distorted

A matter of wind in a blur

The trees birds eye view.

The pipal tree mimics seaIn dealing with a sea wind,

The way it passes in its hair

So unlike in a standing rice

Stalks bending in humility.

Pipal sings sheeted music

Reading from lowered eyes

When a whole world sleeps

Its birds eye views haywire.

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17

The painted sun

In a saffron sky the painted sun

Shines gaily behind a green tree

With orange glow on everybody,

Everybodys leaving but the sun

A fixture that cannot be helped

Like the sunflowers on highway

Frozen before growing into seed

Helplessly nodding head to wind.

Like its flowers a sun nods head

Helplessly to everybodys going.

Neither poet nor painter nor sun

Has a choice in scheme of things.

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18

Fathers day

Let me imagine his flames that

May be spreading their tongues

Where he had turned a flame,

A heat I had felt on moms arm

At times wet with electric grief.

Mom is now flame and her arm.

Some day I burn my own flame.

Together we have fathers day.

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19

Phone noise

Muffled into the purest talk

Phone protesteth too much

When a certain tiny creature

From the vast other shores

Cometh denying my service

And generally laughing loud.

It is such fun to bar all calls.

Virus friend pulls fine legs

Disturbing sanity in pocketMy inward messages are now

A vast silence of the dead sea.

My postpaid is your prepaid

A stick on my abdomen,you sir.

Sayeth the serendipitous virus

We are all in a survival game.I now restore cellular sanity

Now that you have come of this

Hair tearing in flying colors.

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20

Out of doors

The women are now out of doors.

Not that their bodies are happy

In the cool air of vast wide spaces

Or the wind blew in their faces

Gently lifting their temple locks.

In such times of their months

Women are seldom inquisitive,

Knitting their brows with yes?

Nor are needlessly sentimental.Do not ask too many questions.

They get annoyed by hanging.

Come to think of it, they are not

Outdoorsy type, loving the trees

The mountain streams included,

Surely not sitting astride horsesOut in windy spaces of country

Nor waking from rain puddles

With mornings croaking frogs.

Do not ask too many questions

They are hardly the curious type

Their bodies are out of bounds ,

Out of bounds for your knowing.

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21

Body still

After the footage ,after the cries

It is now still under the boulders

A flowing river,with sleep-heavy

Bodies in embrace with the river

In the darkness of inner spaces.

On the shore are different cries

About furious searches for bodies

As time slips between its spaces

As if stillness is dead for all time.

But stillness shall live and soon

The river shall be still as usual

And the bodies sleep will be still,

As all the sand has slipped away.

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22

Wet blanket

You watch your pessimism rise

But exterior act is to feel good

On top of a wet blanket below

But leave it at that,not a thing,

A midnights poem at the most.

Spend it freely,it is not money

Peeling away from epidermis.

Ebullience is boiling over a top,

The poem rising like prose actA spreading thin of semantics

Or a thesaurus caught linking.

But we do not waste a stanza

And keep metaphors for later.

Let the thing dry ,the wet thing.

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23

Short stories

Wonder why stories are to be short

And not ones spilling beyond pages

Their narratives aimed at essences,

Fragrances blowing on short shrift.

But fragments are pieces of lifetime

Like this one triggered by the poet

Who made fragments his business,

A canvas bag on a boy rag-pickers

Scrounging shoulders, stooping lowTo pick up value from the useless.

Each is a short story contradicting

The other broken pieces in the bag

And together they make no sense,

Only the acts of bending to pick up.

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24

The lock-keepers privilege

The lock-keeper is privileged to have

A first glimpse of sun born and dying ,

Through a square window of a cabin

And read newspapers spread on lap,

In iron chair, listen to radio mirchi

Alone , with the egrets for company.

Little did he know he held the keys

To existences of a bus load of youth

Who would be swept away as flotsamOn the flip of his switch, in a burst

Of water ,he to bear the cross for it.

Nobody gets to keep his privileges .

(At least 24 students from an

engineering college in Hyderabad were feared

drowned in the river Beas near Thalot village inHimachal Pradeshs Mandi district after large

quantity of water was released from Larji

reservoir on Sunday)

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25

Train journey

In the dead of night, we woke

From below our vaulting skies,

Changed into rows of corpses

In checked blankets waiting

For glaciation to set on them.

Below lay one covered corpse

That made all sleeping noises

Of an already interred ghost.

Mortuary assistant is passingBetween rows of his charges.

One body, fresh from its sleep

Asks him to keep temperature

Steady 24 Celsius , calibrated.

Bodies feel better at that level.

Tell when my station comes.

Body goes back to cold sleep.

My own sky is two feet above,

Discouraging telescopic views,

A severely limited spatial frame

In a parody of coffin existence

And later,below the earth mud.

Bodies are all going some place.

At six my station should come.

I decide to get into my shroud

And turn a frozen corpse again.


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27

Each body

The late poet said each body

Had its own unique identity.

This one has own , the way

It crouches,in the darkness

Under the stairs or in the lift

Its breath in forgetful liquor,

The way it extends its palms

Wide and enhancing,its way

Of universalizing its sorrows.

The poets body has identity

The way it crouches in lift or

Under stairs, eyes alighting

Behind pillars, its words just

Echoes lost to stair corners,

The way it extends its palms

Wide and enhancing,fingers

Forfeiting their pointedness

Some time on way to a roof

Where lies all its astral stuff.

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28

Just one years rain

Old mans teeth admit wind

As wind blows through them

Like in that mountain pass

Where the rain first appears.

Umbrella is out for mending

By a cobbler at street corner

Who charges too much for it.

Is there anybody cheaper?

Old man is ready to pay just

For one years rain and wind.

Who knows ,he may not be

Around for next years rain.

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29

Remains

In the holy river and its boat

What remains is what I hold

In my minds dusty corners,

Holding an earth pot in hands

With bones whence I sprang,

Bones holding original bones

Their flesh flowing to the sea.

Beautiful remains is the mind

In a head round like the potNow shaven, shorn of origin,

Untethered whence it sprang,

Origin obliterated from earth.

Remains shall stay beautiful

Of somewhat obscure origin

Flowing with poets of words

And their beautiful remains.

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30

City sky

Cities are invisible from inside.

When outside,the citys bodies

Wander vaguely in other cities

On footpaths that do not sleep

The sleep is dust,near tea kiosks.

No matter where bodies wander

Minds are always in their cities,

Whose sky follows them behind.

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31

In a manner of speaking

The train ploughs through the night,

In a manner of speaking, as sleeper

Ploughs through a sleep in the train

Everything is a manner of speaking

(Sleeper may be my wife in the train

But that is not manner of speaking)

Poem words are best allowed to fly off

From the rails where the trains wheel

Ploughs the night to let off its sparks,(Like the knife sharpener in the street

As his foot ploughs through machine),

In manner of speaking, riding a night

When sparks of silence fly off a sleep

While the train is ploughing the night

Words are sparks flying off my nightLike from knife sharpeners machine,

Sparks that do not light lonely nights

But just another manner of speaking.

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32

Private rain

Rain at night is a private thing

Since sleep does not go public.

There is no secret between us

However,when it probes deep

In eyelids and dreams below.

Rain sleeps in dreams diffused

For want of electricity in wires.

Wires are emptied of electricity

Due to rain itself , rains worms,Travelling on private rain tracks

In royal finery, pearls and all.

Only sun makes private pearls

But street lights do it at night.

Our budoirhas fine rain things

Eclectic in sky,pretty fireworksNaked birds shivering in trees.

We have it for our private use,

Trespassers highly prosecuted.

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A poem a day written in June 2014