STALKS OF LOTUS
It is ridiculous to raise a fence
around the steps, but that's it.
Raising a prayer from the graves
of lips or a flower from the bud
of a slit belief is how
it relates itself to life,
true or fictional. Admit,
in the fence you have a plinth
deeper than an azure despair.
You have made your steps auxiliary
with the gravels of slow hurt.
Each step, into bone's corridor.
Traces of light stale at each end
of the tunnel. What's dark
if it is seen, and life?
What is a fence if it is not
like a palm feeling for another
on the float of a last breath
that suddenly turns its face north
and blank, imparting to it the substance
of a lung to close upon
the night enveloping its lawn—
lotus stalks from the navel
of mud, or of a dwarfish god?
A POEM'S WORTH
For a space as little as this
so much quarrel with the world,
for words as few as these
so much ruse, so much subterfuge!
What is had, at last, at hand,
is it worth waiting for?
The whole family is in a quandary—
mother gone to bed without food;
her ravings, her hurt, her pique:
kill her. Who am I
but a maid feeding upon your pity.
But don't forget, we never beat you,
not even once. And wife,
frozen on the threshold,
watches the silent screams
floating in and out of her throat.
The child beaten up is an inaudible
thunder growling in the distance.
When will her tears let up?
You are ashamed to look at the mirror
that this blank space offers.
Each word cropping up holds its own terror.
The thorns of this silence have no flower.
Of what worth is a poem, after all?
FRIENDSHIP
Oh,them! dreadful in calmness:
not enemies but friends,
inimical than brothers.
Those faces pretending naivetee
difficult to discard no less to trust
like the old dresses
to which one gets accustomed.
Within you their bull's eye
while wide of the mark
strays your smile.
You never learnt to be circumspect;
a scarecrow
is all what you have made of yourself
in the coterminous fields
of desolation and despair.
Behind you their frenzied stabs
and the feet, horrified, don't budge
as in dreams
chased by spirits.
Only in abstinence do you
seek pleasure--mildly rocking
that massive dredger, alone,
in the harbour;
only one friend is enough,
even though dead. on the blood-stained back of those almost naked children
who play with sands, their mouths open,
on the edges of our blurred horizons;
their eyes glittering with the tears stolen from ours.
MISSING
The dry leaves are falling again
and this year's advent of summer is so sudden
spring is like something you feel to have missed
but cannot tell what it is exactly like.
You are on your habitual way to the shrine.
There the women are in the line
and those others around are better equipped
with the things other than the offerings.
What have you got for yourself and for the God?
It's not certainly the offerings
that you have missed. The yard is littered
with the dry leaves and often there is a stir
among them. What you miss here
could not be traced to your memory or to prayer
or even to the hands. Your hands do not come
forward to give shape to the wet sands
slipping from under your wobbly feet.
You retreat, your steps not keeping
in accordance with their desired path
and the eyes fleeing from the body
see it from a distance while drifting
across a vast field, the one
akin to that of a cemetery
where all its monuments to the dead are missing.