Labyrinth

The long shadow in the setting sun
Pricks pride with a golden spur
And drowns in the haunting groans
Of dying men.
Gheraoed in the dark tropic wild
The phantom flies in panic,
Tumbling over brambles,
Searching for a pencil of light.

So life moves here, too, in slow strides
On the monotonous extension
Of the sands of the beach.
Somewhere from the seas a strong voice calls;
But the roaring of the foaming surge
Extenuates the call that a thin
And languid breeze misses it always.

Thus pass the whispers of eternity.

The mist around the spirit
Sparkles in the setting sun
Making it a halo round the head -
But, what do we see there but a Minotaur?

Kith and Kin

In all my deeds he smells a rat
But to catch the rat I play the cat;
His words I take with a pinch of salt
But he dissolves the salt at every halt.

I'm a stranger in my native place
Where kith and kin crowd to grace
With a green-eyed madrigal in the morn
Or joyous requiem in the even.

The Urge

A drop
In the ocean
Wets the clay
To mould it
In the sun,
Infusing
Breath.


A drop
In the clay
Struggles
For the ocean
Ere the sun
Stifles
Its breath

The Shadow

With nagging tongue I brushed aside
My sullen silhouette, the jammed details of
The nudging shadow by my side.
It sticks pitch-pitch to me
And rests under the long lonely tree
Of bare branches barked for medicine
Against the vanishing clouds of malignant sky.
It either kicks at me heels shrinking at noon
Or treads on my toes drawn-thin head and limbs.
Always tethered to my feet it browses
The ancient pastures with blazing pride.
And quarrels with my intestine
That lacks the muscle and enzyme
To digest the beaded cake and roasted rooster.

To cure the harping syndrome
Of the singing malady,
At last, I melted it in a crucible
And desiccated to powder
To mould again with my tinge
To make it breathe the expanding world.

But my processed shadow stands sterile,
And lives dead chewing the tasteless gum,
A masticating machine sans sinews.

Let the clock chime the hour for the sun

To vegetable the sullen silhouette,
And shape the jammed details
To burgeon into proper limbs-
No more a shadow
Of the reverberant world.

For Whom ?

Death dries his poetic mystery
Straightening his prosaic form;
Things he never dreamed of in life all happen;
They give him a scented bath
Naked he was born, but accepts
All garments in reeking silence.
The aorma from his floral bed
Drenches not his nostrills
As much as it sweeps
The mind of breathing men
He doesn't ask for those rites and rituals;
But it please the quick to flatter the dead.

As the sacred fire now rages high
His marrow dries and the marrow hies
To us with the pinch of the grave
Yet making us the usual busy slaves.

The distant wind blows near
Whistling the same song
Through wind and weather.

The Desert

All vibrations lost in elemental passion
Each fiber stands open to the sky
Frozen stiff with deep calmness
Dull and void

Will the sun quench the sandy vast
With a few dew drops
To tickle the slumbering dunes
Or suck it dry to wind-blown dust ?

Like blind Cupid's shaft
Will not a cactus pierce the loose soil
A thorny finger to prick the petrified impulse ?
Does it fear to add labour to the barren earth ?
Let some clouds float
Foiling the monotonous sandhills
So that the eternal thirst
Will record a few vibrations;
Ah ! not for a sacred herb or glamorous rose
But just for a simple thorny cactus

To My Father

From whose stoic self,
Robust integrity,
Textured words and deeds
These simple words
Derive
Their verve and verse