In the icy cold,
the frozen seed of pain,
waiting for the spring thaw,
warmer days, brighter sun.
It then blooms into love,--
a dewy fresh blossom
on a new day.
We live our life
like changing seasons:
spring’s youthful love blossoms;
summer’s hot sweating passion;
autumnal shedding and surrender
to the inevitable;
lying frozen
buried under icy layers of pain;
to bloom in spring again.
The wintertime frozen dream-self
now warms up to be an awake-self,
The icy clods melt and trickle of life starts,
Aha, sizzling bright February sun
going like a knife through the cold wind,--
an interplay of fire and ice,
Spring flowers taking birth under dew-showers,
Soul brimming with joy
under clear blue sky,
Life triumphant to come abloom
after death came within an inch of life.
In tune with coquettish cooing,
you take a refreshing plunge
into the pool of love,
Excitement hooks you,
making you a not-so-elegant reveler,
But forget it not o thou journeyman
going boastfully on the path of love,
Remember that by falling in love
you have simply booked
a round-trip ticket
with an open return date,
Return you’ll with a reversed fate,
It’s just a stamp of limited visa
on the passport of your heart,
You will have to come back
and squirm like an irascible caterpillar
once the adventure fever is gone.
You might be embracing someone
but still that person
might be miles away from you in heart.
And someone might be miles away
yet be there right in heart’s center.
With its impish quirks
the darkness that was seeking
the silvery rivulets of shape
from its shapeless mass,
Now it finds a form
in his heart.
Never forget that
even light is seeking
shape, form, embodiment,
Allow it,
Open up,
It will sneak in,
Filling you up
A fish’s drowning is on the land
where you stand
safe on the lovely sand,
And you drown
like a miserly pathetic clown
where she swims,
We are kings in our zone safe
but paupers in other’s territory.
A sweltering tropical night,
The electric saw of her heartlessness,
cutting my dead heart’s woods,
I salvage a fragment of myself
from the slaughter house,
I carry the cutting like a treasure,
The melody is still alive
in its wooden fibers,
That’s where my tapasya lies,
I’ve to work like a passionate artist
and shape the flute
to bring it closer to life,
Then like a flautist
touch my lips to the flute
to come still closer to life,--
to love, to hope, to smile.
Among the clatter and chatter,
Shifting specks and pulsating ripples,
Wavy swirls and mournful elegy of emotions
in the vast recesses of heart,
the generous dimensions of her presence
give me a differently abled self,
Wherein I measure my time differently,--
the heart pierced by the arrows of linear time dies
and its spirit flies in loops of cyclical time:
past pushing into the present;
the present barging into the future;
the future stabbing the past from behind,
It’s a grand collision,
A marvelous crash.
Serrated with the pain of survival,
a man cuts a tree,
Resin and sap oozing from the
cut on the tree’s bark,--
coagulated tears,
It’s a tiny stream of pain
that started in a human heart
and changed to the tree’s tears,
The stream of pain proceeds further,
It now becomes
the sad words of a poet
on the paper made of tree’s flesh,
The sad verse then chimes
with the inaudible whisper of pain
in some reader’s heart.
Enclosed in the fencing
of my ignorance, darkness and misery,
Standing like a poor, meek lamb,
I saw two worlds,--
a joyless me in the circle;
and the other one outside the circle,
full of lush green,
rippling streams of freedom.
The chasm between the two worlds
seemed insurmountable,
The happy they and the sad me.
I moved along the fence
trying to find a way out,
There I came across a locked gate,
The lock rusted and the key missing,
And whatever resources were left
I used in searching for the missing key.
A folly it was,
Just like seeking a cap
that one already wears on the head,
Because the key was always there,
Like it’s with all of us,
It was there
in the safe chest of my heart,
The golden key,
The key of small love—self-love,
The key to open the box
and retrieve another key,
the key to bigger love.
