Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Poems on Reflection



Alien

We can see others

Effortlessly

We can see-
Stars
Rivers
Villages
Cities
Rocks
Oceans
Ants
Peoples
With our own eyes

We can see
Our virtual ‘I’-s
Only by borrowing
The eyes of an inanimate mirror

But we seldom are able to visualize our real 'I'-s

One is far away from oneself

Pity on Us
Pity on Us
Pity on Us

Instead of an I-Pod

Bird of life, come and sing me a song…
I’m searching for a patch of blue
Just like you. (1)


Guillotined were the buds-innocent
-Before the minuscule Quarks
Turned into the giant Universes
-Before the infinitesimal seconds
Transformed into the infinite Histories
-Before the tiny thoughts
Materialised into the massive Revolutions.

Hanged were the dreams pregnant
In the Savage Gardens
By savage gentlemen
It was a dusky dawn.
Doomed doors- half open.
Enlightened eyes- half closed.

We watched cinema that hot afternoon.
Returned home forgetting images seen on the screen
-and slept to get up the next morn.
We forgot the images of our own reality.
We forgot the reality of our own illusions.

Thus we forget. And live. And forget.
We live quantum by quantum.
Of discreet lives in discreet memoirs.

“It’s getting dark, too dark to see” (2)

The sandy moments, still, just suspend
On the liquid sorrows.
Everyone bowing “Yes”
For the accepted way that there exists
No way except to keep aside
The way less traveled.

It rains for forty centuries-and-thus for long
-Long exhausted forty years-
forty seconds in this cold blooded hot space.


A drunken question hovers hazily
Over a red eyed vacuum – full of
Absolute abundance:
When’ll this planet of winners
Become a home for all losers?

Ruined sensibility blinks the dusty eyes
To the call of Kamikaze wanderings.

The waste land metamorphoses
in each fragment of Time-Space.
In faces fossilised.
Light ray bends lightly
Entering through monstrous hoardings
Which lead to the dead retinas.

Octopus of globalised tyranny is taught
In the classrooms in the blank chapters of global moral.

Blind faiths are counted.
They wage wars on the wake of freedom abstract.
Wage wars on the bowing heads.
Wage wars in the name of the god unborn.

Our present presents itself
Like teeth of a fox-deadly.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests
I’ll dig with it. (3)

… I’ll dig.

I’ll dig the time, the space
The villages, the metros
The people, the rulers
I’ll dig the beliefs
I’ll dig Romes, Americas, Bharats, and Darjeelings.

Dig others. Dig myself.
Through the unseen abyss
The unexplored caves of
Homo Sapiens Sapiens dreams.

I dig. I search. I find.
I bury. I plant. I spit.
… Yes, I’m here. Preparing tea
For an outcast and me.
Did the flower bloom this year
Which you planted last season?
How’s your asthma? Still suffering?
Instead of an I-Pod, bought guitar?

________________________________
1- Steve Young, २- Bob Dylan, ३-Seamus Heaney [Digging]