Lullaby

When evening came
At the end of the day,
My Granny sang to the moon:
O moon! Come across the river soon,
Come trippingly riding the ripping waves,
Bring my little one, O moon!
A little rice cooked in milk
In a golden bowl and feed
My little one gutooq, gutooq and gutooq.

The moon never came.
On another day again.
When evening came
My Granny sang to the moon again
And begged the moon again,
To bring the golden bowl,
Filled with rice cooked in milk.

The moon never came.

The sky went moonless,
The stars appeared in strength,
And shone very bright, but
The moon never came.

My Granny never ceased to sing,
She sang again and again.
Until one day my Granny
Didn't sing, but went in flames
To meet the moon high in the sky,
And never back again
Living me alone to cry for the moon
Every evening at the end of the day
And cry for my Granny too.

You & I

You

I affirm this life:

It is mine,

This evening,

My own.

A stone;

Smooth and round,

Alone.

I

A stone, round, smooth and alone,

Splits the surface,

Enters the depth, waking

Deep desires.

Waves after waves after waves;

Memories of long buried days revive,

Swirl to the surface.

Eddies descend to the centre,

Past and present and future are one.

Surely, the promised rebirth is at hand

Surely, the Destiny's will shall be done.

Let's reaffirm then you and I

The glory of rebirth,

In a song, not alone,

But as one,

Amen.

Earthquake

It took an earthquake
To put you to sleep,
And woke me up to the truth;
Everyone is born
With their own earthquake,
With or without a tidal wave,
Intimately private and untransferable,
Death.

Others may feel the tremors
Of your earthquake
Strongly or weakly,
Or none at all.

You alone,
Absolutely alone are
Born to bear
The brunt of its mighty push
Purged of life on your funeral pyre.

This poem was first published on a popular online blog for poetry, Dead Snakes, in April 2015.

Without any Plan

You and I met young,

Wandering on the face of the earth,

Just by chance, without any plan.

At a place unknown

To both, 

At a time fixed by stars,

Not by us on the earth,

In mere play we met

Without any plan.

We stayed together,

Just by chance

For long, long years

Without any plan.

Then one day in time

You died

Just by chance?

Without any plan?

Why?

This poem was first published on a popular online blog for poetry, Dead Snakes, in April 2015.

Almost Always

Almost always

On the verge of leaving

She never did,

She laid herself down beside me

To be herself, and live her life with me.

Almost always.

Until one day,

Quite early really,

When the stars were out and away,

The world was silent as a tomb,

And I was sound asleep,

She left

And laid herself down to live,

Her life without me.

I lost her for good, it seemed

And doomed to search her for ever.

But God! I find her everywhere!

She comes to me, fully alive, even after death

Night after night, day after day

Almost always.

This poem was first published on a popular online blog for poetry, Dead Snakes, in April 2015.

My Dream

Tell me my dream:

I'm the dreamer, you are my dream,

Who's the dreamer, whose dream is me?

Tell me my dream: what are you?

A sign, a symbol or a thing?

And what do you mean?

Are you a simile, a metaphor or metonymy?

And what's your value in communicative economy?

Are you a text or are you a pretext?

Just a context for feelings, emotions and thought processes?

Tell me my dream:

Are you descriptive? Are you prescriptive?

Or are you plainly predictive?

Are you relative to time?

Place or person?

Or are you absolute, eternal?

Ruthlessly TRANSCENDENTAL?

Are you intransitive or are you transitive?

Or are you a sort of ergative?

Are you masculine or are you feminine?

Are you neuter or are you neither?

Tell me my dream:

What is your gender?

Indeed, what's your language? What's the grammar?

Your phonetics, syntactics, semantics?

Are you art? Are you science?

Are you normative? Or only positivistic?

And what's your aesthetics?

Please spell out your ethics?

Are you organic? Are you mechanistic?

Tell me my dream:

You're sometimes beautiful

Other times ugly,

Why do you change thus?

Is it by choice or is it obligatory?

Why do wake up when I'm sleepful?

Why are you playful when I'm anxious?

What is your marital status?

Tell me my dream:

Why do you visit me only at night?

Why do you leave me at daybreak?

Are you shy or are you arrogant?

Whatever you be whoever you be,

Whatever your sex, colour or creed,

White or black, violet or blue,

Yellow, red or orange, green,

You are mine and mine alone,

Private, personal, uniquely one.

Abide with me till Kingdom comes. Amen.

The night is dark,

The morning far away.

Until morning, my dream, abide,

Abide with me. Amen.

Without Rhyme or Reason

My love is like a poem
That does not rhyme with the world at all
But full of sounds and signs
Signifies  the world et al.

Aesthetically thin is its body:
It has no sensuous taste or touch,
Odour or Colour or music as such.
It is a bare structure of itself
Unspontaneous, intransitive, indeterminate;
Suspended  between self and self.

My poem is like my love
That does not reason with the world at all.

Passion on the Cross

The ache of the flesh
Is physical,
But of the soul philosophical.

All are born with the former,
Only a few are blessed with the latter.

The ache of the flesh dies with death
But of the soul is eternal;
The one is of existence, existential;
The other is of essence, essential.

We make our cross with both;
The vertical
On the horizontal.

Passion on the cross alone
Is existential, congruent with essential. 

A Hypothesis

Future is a hypothesis
That takes a life-time to test;
An infinite series of possibilities
That death alone can lay to rest;

It alone can inaugurate 
Eternity of life and death;
A cycle of inexorable dualities;
To die, to be born again, and again to die,
Ineluctably .