To Love

Would you choose

To love

Or to

Be loved ?

Would you choose ecstasy and craving

And to hurt and be hurt

Or peace and happiness

And the occasional bliss?

Why is love so terrible,

So grand

It makes commonplace happiness seem

A modest pay when love is your royal coffer – even if you are a prisoner of war.

Clenched Soul

~ Pablo Neruda

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.

I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.

Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?

The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.

Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

Nimbu Chai

Giddy hearts engorged with excitement

Swollen like plump potato vadas.

Anymore happiness, and they would burst

Of rapture they can’t contain.

Desires of fingers groping a breast,

Mouth seeking an anklet,

Cascade hot silver –

Fresh rasgulla syrup on satin bedspread.

Doubts, deceits (Othello, Brutus),

Chilliflake lungs, prick fork into

(engorged potato vada) hearts, pulping them

Into tomato chutney.

Love

Stories

Are like that.

They tend to dissolve

Like colors of a nimbu chai

Sky.

Again and Again

-by Rainer Maria Rilke

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which others
fall : again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

The Stolen Child

-William Butler Yeats

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.


Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.


Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.


Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

Waterfall

There were the Western Ghats, bursting throught the bellies of which were leaves, branches and roots; of every concievable shade of green, though now with a lazy stroke  of dusk rendering them a sort of hopelessly beautiful, tragic quality, with the promise that the night was about to come... or maybe hopefully beautiful haunted quality of the promise of the morning that will eventually chase away the night.

There was some mist hanging across them- like the veil of something that needs protection (not everyone will find it easy to believe that something as tough as mountains need protection in the form of a gauzy lacework of clouds and mists,though). And right across the heart of the mountains hung this infinitely fragile threadwork of diamonds- molten diamonds (if anyone has ever heard of melting diamonds), trickling like beads of prayer. This was the most beautiful present the monsoons decorated the Ghats with. Yes, it was the most beautiful waterfall.

Why, when one sees a watefall (water fall) across rocks, one feels joy, longing, beauty, hope and sadness all at once?

a sheet

of drizzles across my misted window

a trickle

of the waterfalls that flow

a sound

of the word  unsaid

a beam

of sunlight on my bed

a beginning

at the beginning of time

a blessing

of your hands in mine

a moment

of realization of our dreams

a sigh

that surpasses all our screams

a you

who could make my life

a me

who could be your wife

a love

that like silences and words will grow

a life

that through ethers, spaces and time will flow

BACK TO SCHOOL DAYS

Blue n yellow, the bus, honking along
Blue-capped driver, with a brand new song.
Shoe-laces n pigtails; they don’t look bizarre,
Faces with tears or smile, lovely as flower.

Rhymes n drawing n mathematics,
Planting n sculpting with all new tactics.
Picnics in woods with the colored ball,
Cakes n pizzas n chocolates for all.

Choco-chipped eves n lemonade splashed days;
Running n bowling n swimming our ways.
Fleeing the scene of ‘mothers with milk’;
Playing in the sun with heads of silk.

Parks n beaches n trees were pleasure,
Funny, we seem to have forgotten our treasure!
Sand-castles and pixies and the blue-tooth fairy,
Have gone somewhere n left our lives so dreary.

Growing up was fun, grown-ups are not,
The one next to you is liar or a cheating blot.
Silver n golden scintillating were our ways.
If clocks changed ways, I’d be back to school days.

Childhood

My childhood days were filled with the love and light that every child rightfully deserves from the time she even begins to be a child.
Angels come to earth in the form of children, with their white, glistening faith, sparkling smiles and glittering eyes, complete with wings and halos (if we are capable of going beyond the mundane and seeing).
‘Childhood’, the word stirs in me a few feelings, brings to me some moments, a few stories, though mostly incomplete and infinite poetry, thoroughly forgotten.
Poetry? Yes, some R.L.Stevension, some Robert Frost, an Alfred Tennyson and thousands and thousands of sounds, a hundred half forgotten words, some colors that the words would feel, some feelings that the verses would color; some fairies, some Gods, some magic and my mother.

I’m no more a child in appearance, though in some ways, other than on the surface, I will still claim to be one. I’ve grown up, into an adult, well into the ways of the world. Still sometimes I find myself face to face with all the forgotten Stevension and Robert Frost they taught me at school. Such profound beauty and completeness they’d given to my life that I still seek them, in books and websites, in the voids of my heads, the spaces of my heart and the closets of my memory.
There are some verses, half forgotten wrapped in cloudy dreams, some hidden by a pale shadow, of perhaps some calamity that had come with it, like a reprimand or a standing-out handed by my teacher and there are some more, glittering, as if through a pool of clear water, like gems at the bottom, reflecting all the sunlight. They hold in them mysteries, good ones, capable of giving hope and joy. They tell stories, some real stories (if, by some faith, we can actually believe that stories can be real), some made in that child’s head of mine! Some smell of naughty children who picked on me, some have the scent of a honey-coloured day, smelling of warm, sticky, bright pink candy and a garden picnic among flowers and butterflies and still others have the smell of old books in the library, of deep incense of a small and beautiful chapel and some smell of hot tears of punishments in PT classes.

A few of the poems which I managed to finally find J

R.L.STEVENSION.
Foreign Lands
Up into the cherry tree
Who should climb but little me?
I held the trunk with both my hands
And looked abroad in foreign lands.
I saw the next door garden lie,
Adorned with flowers, before my eye,
And many pleasant places more
That I had never seen before.
I saw the dimpling river pass
And be the sky's blue looking-glass;
The dusty roads go up and down
With people tramping in to town.
If I could find a higher tree
Farther and farther I should see,
To where the grown-up river slips
Into the sea among the ships,
To where the roads on either hand
Lead onward into fairy land,
Where all the children dine at five,
And all the playthings come alive.

My Shadow
I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.
The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow--
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an india-rubber ball,
And he sometimes goes so little that there's none of him at all.
He hasn't got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close behind me, he's a coward you can see;
I'd think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!
One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

The Swing (* this poem I studied in Std II or III! It was a favorite! Mom even got me a real swing in our garden)
How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide, River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside-- Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown-- Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down!