Whom Should I Blame?

 

What we do and what we don’t,--

Maybe it is our choice,

Or maybe the hands of providence

guide or misguide?

Don’t know

whether it is our action’s rejoice,

or partisan fate’s prejudice?

Stealthily we try to ensure

the credit for the good falls in our own bag,

And if things go wrong

our stage-manages throng

to put all blame on the old hag.

 

Whatever we may think of ourselves,

We’re, but, the good- or bad-chanced kids

of the parental—earthly and other worldly—topsy-turvies,

If not so,

What person is there to wish

directly his doom;

Which life’s light voluntarily seeks

to be extinguished to gloom?

Still—less directly and more indirectly—many

against their will are brought to the wrong end,

Where the expected destination

does not exist not even in name;

Where the undoing sweeper chuckles in all its fame,

And the half-willed animal

gets tethered to a peg for a chained tame,

Then follows the great game,

Many try to put each other to blame.

 

It is but a futile mockery,

Mere verbosity cannot bust

the secret of that trickery.

 

Ever-lorn to justify ourselves,

Many-a-time we put the blame

squarely on the destiny’s elves,

saving just digestible morsels for ourselves,

And feed mammoth dose of

unwanted garbage to the uncomplaining lady.

 

What does it matter

if the blame lies with us

or it is borne by the

speeding wheel’s crush,

The loss, after all, is a loss,

Whoever is the causing boss.

 

To me, either both of us go scot free,

Or both are put under the accuser’s glee!

Life

 

It is good that

we must cultivate dreams,

But most often

man’s uncertainty and destiny’s certainty screams

to shatter them to pieces.

 

We, though must hope

to evade the deadly anchor’s drop,

It is our futile, and not so futile, duty to

carry the life’s ship through heaving waves,

Wonderful! So many winds one braves!

 

Like smouldering coal in the hull

the passion ever craves,

The tiny flicker braves

against the mightiest swathes of stormy dark,

Storms, meanwhile, play against the timber strong,

In the wooden frame, but, many dreams throng,

And enjoy the journey, though, unfinishable and long!

 

Time’s worms eat the timber,

And stealthily doth eventuality limber,

to sneak through the destiny’s holes,

Longly piled up agony of the storm furiously rolls,

Carried thou so far and wide;

tattered are those soles.

 

We carry a mountainous bulk of hopes

encased in some ash and tear drops,

How meticulously time thrashes its harvest,--

From buxom ripe fruits

it reaps only peelings and stones,

From life’s crop

death reaps only the lifeless drop,

The majestic reaper

wants but few grains of soil

from all the juicy, lifeful, thriving tissues.

 

Still, we have to live

and we need to hope

till that final mop,

We know that the slate will be

cleaned up after all,

But we have to play our part in life’s ball,

For crammed will be the hall

tomorrow as well,

When in other bodies life will dwell.

Conversation with a Stranger

 One day he asked someone hiding inside

the bodily façade like a fugitive,

‘Who are thou?

And why despite all the architectural negativities

people define thou positively?’

From its unreachable deep cellar

that someone raised its germ-free, disinfected voice,

‘I am the exiled one without choice,

While the bones and the flesh around me

in worldly spotlight rejoice,

I just take the ordained backseat

and watch the game of

birth, survival, struggle and death

played inside the castle on the shaking stage.’

‘Don’t you feel perplexed by the passing days?’

Again the query was voiced,

‘Don’t you feel bad or ever you rejoiced?’

It answered in a heavy, impassive tone,

‘Thy gimmick cannot shake my throne,

In the timeless shades I spend my time here

and when the castle will be broken

the death squad will find the door open,

Away I’ll fly with the figures of

deeds and misdeeds to the final court,

and if it is found short,

again I’ll be exiled.

It has been like this for thousands of years,

but I never rejoice at new birth

nor weep at death and shed tears,

My book lies in mighty primordial hands

and the player to settle scores

changes with worldly trends,

I am the same forlorn, exiled child

of the majestic, mighty father,

It’s a never-ending game perhaps,

A tiny cog on the chessboard of creation,

Let’s see how high and mighty you make the castle,

Void will then gobble the tone and stars!’

The Old Moon and the Imperiled Panorama

 

Pallid rays of this pale moon

had grown old so soon

during that half hour before the morning twilight,

It was a chilly, clear-skied, frosty, fogless January night,

The moon just a night away from fullness

had been exceptionally bright.

 

Nightlong, almost near the acme of its beauty

it had fulfilled its luminous duty,

Its milky beams had over-lighted

or overshadowed many a star,

It seemed eager to blot out

every stain and tainting tar,

Its beams falling like snows

upon sleeping horizon to the far,

The beautiful plains of this countryside

were lying in sleepy abundance

under the milky, chilly blanket with slumberous pride,

Everything was open to this celestial torch

with nothing to hide,

Cold-basking fields were huddled under their croppy sheets;

above was gloating the marvelous moon-shine,

Wheatlings stood bow-headed in reverence

with dewy crown fine,

Those marigold flowers were shining

unabashed under the milky showers,

The flowers happy about

losing their colors to the lover’s

mysterious smiles and its powers,

White pea flowers boasted their augmented whiteness,

Aha, such dolefully beneficent had been the brightness,

Even trees didn’t seem dark, indistinct specters

lurking shadowy over the horizon,

They appeared boats of foliage

floating in a misty sea,

In the background of such a brightly lit stage

even the sky seemed earth-lorn,

Through the milky transparency

its bluish-black veil lurked and through it

only the brightest stars smiled,

Scattered in the docile swathes of this

moon-baked countryside

villages seemed like mammoth ships silently

floating in the white wavy sea of light.

 

The moon was now well past its prime,

as if in shining too bright it had committed a crime,

Its setting quarter was in the north-west,

where the moony panorama had shone at its best,

And now it was moving towards rest,

Its strength and vigor had

dangerously plummeted down,

It now seemed ogling with a

meek, angry, anguished, helpless frown,

Its brightness was rapidly fading out

And its yellowish pale rays

appeared eager for a wailing shout,

Glumly it was fading over that sandy undulation

carrying fields, furrows, crops on its gently unfolding dome,

Shiny fruits born of sweat-laden efforts in its sandy loam,

Accusingly the moon threw pale, protesting

shadows in south-east,

where urbanism, consumption and crass commercialist

blatantly had its seat commanding, metropolitan, capitalist feast,

The area had been earmarked

for some merciless development project,

It now being defined by a tiny space

bound in a map issued under

the state government’s gazette notification,

What a mischief by the developmental hand!

Ever eager to bulldoze over the nature

and turn it into uncomplaining, lifeless sand,

where lustrous stones will be built over the nature’s burial,

Oofs! How heartless, wanton and depraved!

 

This pale, mournful moon

which was to set soon

into the misty gloom of twilight,

when a bright sun of consumerism and commerce

was ascending to its dawning height,

Those stalks of reeds

which sway in the cold breeze without greeds

seemed gently bidding the moon a good-bye,

Plummeted which further down

with a swollen face and a sigh,

Its pallid face grimacing with a painful nostalgia,

Its fading, setting rays tainted with deadly paleness;

Its oblong, teary face

now looked at this landscape,

Sleepy fields, warmthful wastes and fallow lands,

What mighty lessons have been taught here!

Aha! The farmer going to the fields with his gear,

Those long, painful, sometimes fruitless days

subsided when the sun’s eager rays

looking at the sweat’s trove

and the shirt’s hoe,

Where the long painful dark nights

arrived like the deeds accomplished,

Where the failures galore

but the hard work never bored,

These failures defined success

as the losses stood just as a testimony to the profits,

Where hopes, aspirations and desires

varied with the changing hues of weather,

Farmer pawning everything

for the feathers in destiny’s crown,

Gold forms immaterially—

or minimally at the rate of a dust speck for a gram—

in the toiled soil brown,

All will be gone,

The moon was also dying with a moan,

This beautiful charming mystery of the landscape—

why hardest labour fetches minimal returns;

and why a bit less harder toil results in

a soul-satisfying speckful of return that seems wealthiest—

All this beautiful, aesthetic, curvy, circuiting strings;

Mysteries of landscape, of destiny,

of the see-saw battle between pleasure and pain,

between penury and sustainable as well as gluttonous gain,

between life and death:

All this will be lost for a direct, straight,

materially penetrating needle of surety,--

The commercial, unflinching and fixed

use of the landscape

in the form of concrete approach

where profits will boomerang

in proportion to the short-cuts;

Where compromised morality, ideology and conscience

will not face any ifs and buts;

Where there will not be any sweet scent

of labour that will be replaced by

the mechanical, greasy, muddy panting

of merciless competition and grab;

Where concrete blocks, flats will replace

these wonderous solitudes basking in and around;

Where sheaves, stalks, straw and reeds

will not sway to the breeze,

but blank, rigid, ironed tower

will stand mutely, inflexibly to the nature’s cooing calls.

 

Now the sorrowfully yellowing

death rattle of the setting time

was arriving with a chime.

There on the opposite horizon the day opened a window

to sneak a peek at the imperiled room of the night,

Wispily, there was the twilight

with its mixed day-night delight,

In its mysterious lap,

the old moon met a slightly premature death,

Slumped as it feebly, freely

into the silvery sea of mist

standing still over the treeline.

Into this sea of death, the moon plunged,

And the twilight mischievously winked

with it unfaithful, teasing look asking favours

both from the night and the day,

The old moon was gone with its last ray,

And soon-to-be-doomed panorama,

unmindful of the fatality waiting,

came out of its dewy slumber,

A crane’s clarion call

cree….ked over its yawning breast,

The sun prepared to cast its first ray

and the fields got up for another hard farming day.

 

PS—Time of the poem: Half hour before the morning twilight of January 13, 2006 (Lohri); a day before the full moon day (Makar Sakranti, January 14).