We were fascinated by its heights
And the phallic God it held for us,
Who is the boss of beasts ‘n birds.
He stayed a mere stone watching
Bricks fall of homes and temples
As they would bring down people
They had sheltered all their lives.
He was stone god,not brick God
A phallus who destroys to create.
His ashes are all about our bodies.
(Nepal the Himalayan kingdom experiences its worst ever earthquake with a casualty figure of around 10000 and enormous destruction)
In election days statue can’t smile.
And now there is shroud on a face
For the non-statues to fly on whir.
All this while the sea rises and falls
For the ones living, not yet statues
By God’s two fingers saying Statue!
One never knows when He says it
And a stony smile is stuck on face
And hand remains pointed to sky.
A far seer spoke words that enacted deaths,
Words wrapped in a worry over extinction.
The blind king saw his words turning to ash
As the sun fell behind vast blind mountains
Giving a few temporary lies to certain death.
The far seer tells he saw mighty warriors fall
And golden chariot rushing without its sun.
A hundred sons fall in a web of their deceit.
A blind poet saw the endless rushing of life
By winged chariot without its effulgent sun.
A library of books rose to sky from his earth
A knowledge that dated back to a sunny sky.
(In the Hindu epic of Mahabharata , the battle of Kurukshetra unfolded for the blind king through the words “I saw” by an eyewitness seer who described the events of the war in a streaming narrative. In The Alef : Infinite wonder/Infinite pity by J.L.Borges the narrator describes the vast whirring world he has seen with the words I Saw..)
The naked men would come from the hills
Their purity already tested in natural sky.
(Here we write pure poem in an azure sky
About waters that washed down corpses.)
The corpses had renounced their worlds
But their suns went on to rise regardless.
The naked men have renounced clothes
But now what to do with hanging things.
We have no tears enough to wet our eyes
And what to do with the hanging things.
Along the beach on sidewalk
Is Gandhi’s ghost who walks,
Just to remind us of monkeys
To speak, hear and do no evil.
Monkeys are stone squatters,
Too dumb to remind a thing.
Bull nods enormous head
Laterally under a blue sky.
Its master’s future is a sun.
Our coins shall be his sun.
That famished old parrot
Brings out a future’s card.
A bull is clothed and fed.
A parrot is caged and fed
Their own beastly futures
Are words shining in sun.
Sky goes blue with words.
A sky bristles with future.
The butter he had on lips was a cloud.
You too would be cloud upon his flute
Its finger holes breathing your dance
Your eyes softly closed to the breeze.
You are not besotted woman by river,
Just a nut dancing to camphor flame,
No gender issues about the prankster
Who ate a muddy universe in mouth.
On a visit to the Arti ceremony in the Hare Krishna temple in Bangalore
Looking away is amoral kind of a lie
Like the elephant death when spoke
Or mentioned in passing in epic war
Where cousins fight half light’s end.
The half light is lie constantly spoke,
Blurred loose ends hanging in there
A pretension that tomorrow is hope.
Someone up there speaks a full lie.
(In the Kurukshetra war a half lie spoken by Yudhistira about the death of an elephant named Aswathdhama leads to the death of an invincible Dronaacharya who lays down arms believing his son by the same name had been killed in the war)
We were confused in single head
About Brahma’s number of heads
Including skull we saw in the hills
Loosely lying in the flowing river.
Brahma had a fifth that looked up
In incest at a daughter of himself.
We were confused in single head
About heads – three, four or five
We have only a head that swivels
On the shoulders unidirectionally
With no view of what is up in sky.
We feed rice to our men up there.
My mind overflows my body.
Take my body- I don’t need –
And my bags in that corner.
Give it to the medical student
And to the Kolkata rag picker.
(former Chief Minister of West Bengal Mr.Jyoti Basu wished his body, on death ,to be donated to the Medical College)
Indian Metaphor 