Caravan

Caravan

Hear the lament
of Time
as a moment after a moment proceeds
leading the caravan
to an unknown land.
It's Noah with seeds
of life and new forms
to sow in a soil
virgin and new.
I watch from my shore and bless..
This robe I wear is frayed.
The seasons have stopped
Neither a spring nor a fall
neither rains nor a summer.
The caravan moves
with neither a clue nor a lead.
It's a sand-storm
from this end to the other.
Haunted and fretful
the caravan moves
neither a mirage nor an oasis to soothe.

A Vagrant

A Vagrant

A vagrant ascetic was sitting

 On the bank of a river, quietly.   There were no ripples in the river

Except where a rock or a boulder breaks the flow

And vainly tries to hold her down.

The ascetic too was without a sign of a ruffle,

And nothing else there was in view

As far as his eye could see

Except the stream and

The shadows of the pine trees bending

Over him and over the flow.

Invisible were both—he and the river

To the eye of any passing beholder—

So quiet were the river and the man.

How long he had been brooding there

No one knew—over the expanse of the waters.

No one knew except the river and the man

That moment—

That moment of love—

That moment when the man became aware of love.

No one knew except the river when the man got up

And surged forward, not in madness but in love.

There was nothing before that he had held in his mind—

It was emptied of all essence.

The river knew him even before he came.

She carried his secret word in her heart.

Even before he had uttered the word.

She knew him when he came.

And as he watched her path

Resting on the edge of her waters

She knew what she had known

All along as she coursed her path.

The river even knew the empty spaces inside his silence.

The river knew why the spaces

Were emptied of all essence.

The river knew how to break the guarding walls

And rush inside those empty spaces

Because emptiness was known to her

Ever since she had learned to flow.

He guarded his emptiness—

That was his freedom: inherited,

And the river was a river because she knew what freedom was.

And the man was her lover

Destined to come to her banks.

Alas, she could not wait like that virgin maiden

Under the shades of that pine tree

And watch for the sign of his coming.

She was a river; she had to flow.

Every moment she was born anew

Until the destined moment came

And agitated the heart of the lover

Who did not know her and the vortex

 In the heart of her flow.

The man in full awareness

Woke up from his trance.

He looked deep in the vortex where the river ran and plunged herself

Deep in the knowledge of her being,

Hiding her secret there.

She had taken the plunge long ago;

She had hidden her secret long back;

And long back she had risen from the vortex

And rushed up to flow forward and forward again.

Wanderers and travelers,

Pilgrims and ravagers

Had stood there on her banks.

The vortex was a terrific sight to behold.

None waited there long enough

To look and delve into the secret heart—

In its still and secret heart.

The man came and watched.

The vortex held no fear for him.

Secrets are revealed

When you watch and fall in love with what you see.

That is the way knowledge dawns

Like the ray of a morning

From the still center of a vibrant heart

To fall into the silent lake that ripples in love

And hides the light of the dawn

In its calm surface
which veils the knowledge the ascetic has

Of the river and her flow shielded in his heart.

And the river flows on

With the knowledge of the moment of love, she was waiting for

With the stillness in her movement

And she in the stillness
separated from the flow

Waiting for love to happen on her banks.

And I have seen them both:

The stillness and the movement,

The river and the lover

In these woods of far-away, nestling in their trance.

Choose Not Part 5. Concluded

“What are you seeking? Do you really know?”

He had asked once,and the answer brought me face to face

With the truth of all my being.

What did I seek all along 

Like the soul that seeks the God within?

He knew that and that was why his question was as lucid

And simple as was his unseen being.

The anguish of alienation spoke in him

Like the words of God’s loneliness faced with a human

Who cannot read the signs

Of that which is standing to confront him,

As candid as the sky.

In retrospect, I hear the anguish;

I hear the desperation to reach

The sound of a human speech.

I see the eyes which I have never seen,

Piercing the darkness of my soul,

Piercing the wind which carried his word and made me see what lay concealed

Behind the veil that was hiding him.

He wore no mask; it was a veil that covered him.

It was a veil, half revealing the hope of a meeting

And half concealing the wounds within

Which he had wrapped in a bandage of age-long suffering

That had turned him into a stone.

“When our most precious moments are fading out fast

How can I linger in the utilities

And stop myself from telling you

The essential truth, the truth that lies within you and me?”

Those were the words of the swan-song he was singing to me-

The song that I in fear refused to hear.

Now every image that he projected for me

Comes back in its full colours,

Not a shade is lost,

Not a colour has faded out

And not a word is lost.

He was my creation and I in turn was created by him

In the image I had known of myself

In my idyllic past of long ago.

I had torn it into shreds long ago.

He came and picked up the fragments shred by shred

And put them back in place where they belonged

And an image was formed of unparalleled beauty.

He was my spirit which I had left behind

In disgust and distress and estrangement.

He was my ascetic soul come back to me, urging me to take courage

And recognize him, and utter the words

Which he longed to hear from me-

“You are that Light which I was seeking.”

He waited for me to utter those words without the fear of scrutiny.

He knew my quest and the answer too;

He knew my fears and doubts.

In turn, he was afraid that I might retract from the path

Without even setting a foot on it.

“You must loathe everything that comes between you and your answers”,

He had said once to me.

“Seize the answers in full awareness, for they can be taken,” he said.

“But if you don’t own them you will die; you will die without your answers;

And dying without owning what is yours is no good for a living soul,” said he.

How was I to know what vibrated behind his words

In the absence of his living voice and its living tone?

The need to get across to me over the oceans of distance and time

Was gnawing at his heart

And I was as dense as a stone.

He had thrown the keys across to me over an abyss with a hope

That I might catch them right and reach him where he might be.

But when I reached the house there was neither a gate nor a door, simply broken walls.

There was no door to open;

Everywhere was an endless desert.

Actually, I could see that he had slammed the door shut

When he had stepped out, but on a second thought,

He came back and threw it wide open, since the broken walls had nothing to hide.

Inside were the empty spaces and vacant walls staring down.

He had deleted all history and  the signs saying that he lived there,

The signs of his presence and all that spoke of him

Had vanished out of sight.

He had destroyed the house

Leaving nothing for me to fear in the vacuum he had left behind.

There was nothing to fear

Because nothing was there to choose.

Choose Not Part 4 8July14

As I am sitting here and writing                                          8July14

And watching out of the window

Listening to the insistent calls of a squirrel—

Unseen but somewhere out there, I see a young girl peeping out of her apartment-window,

Throwing something out to the birds perhaps,

Unmindful of what she was doing.

Suddenly the urge overpowers me—

The urge to break out of my apartment-world—

The urge to break out of this body of mine

To be with that being wherever might be.

But I know, he has disappeared

Even from this virtual world of a while,

Nowhere to be found, nowhere heard.

His act of disappearing was as mysterious as was his existence in this world.

He came like a gust of wind

And went away like the heart of a stone.

I saw in an image

Two women with their heads covered with the dark red end of their sari,

Bending over a prayer-lamp they were going to float

In the dark and a purple river.

It was the river he had mentioned once,

The river Bagmati-

And the place was Nepal-

Pashupatinath, Lord Shiva-

The creator, destroyer and the controller of all,

Was going to answer their prayer.

From here with my mind’s eye wide open in a moonless sky,

I join them in their prayer, whatever that prayer may be.

I saw only a half of the moon;

The other half was always dark.

My prayer is for the dark half

And my wishes are for the bright part

That was ever a witness to my soul.

Contd