The Second millennium : About to Come of Age

The Second Millennium-About to Come of Age

The Year gone by:
A red dot of pain, a frozen tear,
with a hand of a child
tugging at it,
to pull it down like a balloon lost
to the winds of Time.
How can the eye fail to see what's written so plainly
all over the sky?

The Year so new and so close ,
about to rise
like a bright red drop of sun
with one eye hiding behind the cloud
and the other eye shining
from behind the hill,
spilling the honey and caramel
as if from the hands of a child running downhill.

I Resonate...

I Resonate...

Visions and perspectives- fierce collision,
and I tumble and hit the ground. Words echo, unreal sounds,
I know it's empty and I have reached the farthest end
.
You have overtaken me by leaps and bounds.
I have been left behind, still groping and believing
that I was chosen for the path.
No; I am not!
I was a voice heard in passing,
a wisp of feather that crossed your path,
at first in a gentle curiosity.

I had never seen a feather catch fire,
and when I did
there was no vision that held a touch more flagrant than the one of a feather burning when nothing else burnt.

I have heard the silence of the breathtaking heights of the steep hillsides,
the silence in the wave as the tide recedes.
the silence that comes in the wake of a storm;
and I heard myself saying every time it happened,
"It's just the effort of climbing that put you out of breath, or
it's just the spent-up rush of the wave that has taken your speech away; or it's just a little rain that has drenched all;
don't call it a storm--it's just a little rain!

The silence came in many forms, until i stopped looking for it. Sometimes it came with precursors and signs, and sometimes it swayed in, unannounced.
But silence was never alone when it came; he and the silence came hand in hand.
His words echoed:
Once I said, 'That is the farthest end.  We reach there
where the search is over and thus is nihilism born."
He said without bending his tone,
"Or perhaps we meet God!"

There is silence in the heart of peace,
like the monastic silence in the heart of caves carved in the ribs of hills.
Or I may not be there; neither you nor me;
a new life may await us there
either full of infinite possibilities
whose meaning may lie beyond this region where we are
striving to end all absurdities, striving to transcend all dualities.

The Litany of Leaves : The Bodhi Tree

The Litany of Leaves: The Bodhi Tree

Resting under this ancient tree,
you closed your eyes; closed your eyes and just rested.
The tree was grateful for your presence.
The sap of life surged up through the roots and brought back life
to the tired branches and the silent leaves.
You sat in silence and did not know
that the tree watched and listened.

The tree knew the litany of leaves,
the pages of the life of the tree.
While you wandered, the tree was rooted--
rooted in her waiting,
waiting and watching,
watching and listening,
listening for the footfalls  on the routes
Every route you followed ,
in every season of life,
brought you closer to the root of the tree,
and oh, such a long wait for the tree !
The leaves were going to fall.
Their litany of prayers was heard.
They will fall in peace,
leaving the empty space
to the new leaves coming in the place.
The new leaves will not know
the songs of the litany the old leaves sang,
but the tree will know their song and remember
the day you came and rested here
closing your eyes in peace.

The In-dweller

The In-dweller

Where are you hiding, my in-dweller?
When you talked fervently of time running out on both of us,
when the shadows of the impending dark
had already begun to quiver in your voice,
I was singing in the joy of finding you here.
The joy I was as yet unfamiliar with,
the joy I had just begun to see with disbelief,
its reality too fragile and brittle to hold
even when I touched it with frail dew-covered gloves,
that joy still floating with this fragrance of the open sky and the sea;
I wanted to hold on to it as long as i could.

How would I know that the evening was the last one !
True..As i recall, you were desperate to make me see the truth
of how precarious our hold was
on that something which was a strange serendipity
which had brought us face to face, and was to stay with us only as long as the evening remained.

I know, it broke you to wreck that seemingly steady foothold in the sand.

The tide was waiting and the storm was raging
and I did not read the signs in the dark
of the gorge of the ocean that sent you signals not to linger any longer, looking for the saving spark.

Your ocean and the sky called you back; your ship was ready to embark upon.
You knew where you were heading to go,
and I in my yearning to hold you back
could not read the script writ so large
in the words that were meant to be 'Farewell'.

In this dense overgrowth of trees
I do not know where to look for you,
where to leave a message for you
that you might read,
written on the waters and the shifting sands.

You made me understand as never before
how irredeemable a loss can be
of something you could never call your own.

Tomorrow, a new day will dawn;
and I will hear nothing but silence
that reverberates
through all the sounds the ocean makes.
 This is the song of a nameless being
without any attributes to mark it by,
a song of anonymity.

A Dialogue in Twilight

 A Dialogue in the Twilight

A priestess of Egypt
dwelling in the vaults of pyramids in the sands,
covered from the crown of her
head to the smallest of the toes,
in her blood-red scarlet robes --
I saw her when it was the end of her day and the start of my night,
when both of us were awakened and watching
the rise of the Third Eye on the horizon of our sky.

She was sad, terribly sad,
and I was hurt, unspeakably hurt:
hurt, not harmed!
There was still some light streaking on our horizon,
and the hurt and the sadness and the gloom thereof
had made the sky murky and dark.

An abyss of aeons ripped us apart
She from the suffocating silence of the secrecy of the knowledge the pyramids held
and I from the wounds and scars I brought
from the endless comings and goings
through the narrow gates,
heavy with the burden of memories, good and bad,
stood in silence apart.

She held no answers, I no saga which would embed a question.
And we both knew, we were done with them long ago.
Yet in that twilight hour, as if out of a dream,
abstracted, we stood on the shore of Time,
both strangers, brought in that unpredicted hour
together to face our long-lost secrets of lives untold.

Except a silence, unfathomable to both,
we had no common language to sail across  on the winds of Time.
Soon the star at the peak
sank below the farthest rim,
and we spoke.

"What are we grieving over," we asked.
She threw her head back in a desperate bid,
"A priestess cannot bare the secret sorrows", she said.
They have to be deposited in the secret heart of the ancient pyramids for eternity to feed upon them and annihilate.
I was a consort to dead emperors as they lay buried in the vaults for eternity. I do not know  how to breathe.
I have forgotten the art of breathing."

She was breathless, but I was unrelenting.
I had to wrench her knowledge and make it my own,
before the sun went down behind the hills
and the landscape plunged in the dark.
I brought all the force of my will to dwell
on her heart of silence and secrecy.

She spoke, "It's cold, very cold, inside the vaults of time.
It is the heart of shining darkness, dazzling black,
where I dwelt all along.
Once a triple Goddess, wearing a tiara of light,
sacred and secret to the alchemy
of the pyramid of flesh and the light of the spirit,
I sealed the knowledge in those vaults.
Ethereally charged, my sacred potions
were delivered into the hands
of maidens divine.
When ritually ingested, they were
a source of prophecy,
the lucid inner eye, and divine ecstasy.
That was my source where I would fain return, if I could only glimpse back the forgotten path.
Centuries of abuse of my secret charm
have buried the memory of what I was.
There are sentries in the pyramid posted to guard
the secret paths to my inner chambers.
My lips are sealed, my language stolen
by emperors of darkness and lust.
You my child, you escaped the darkness long back;
and now in this small hour, stolen from the march of Time,
We stand here, facing our saga
over immeasurable spans of Time,
before the tide of darkness invades and swallows
our separate but fluid identities.
Your sores and wounds and scars
are not yet beyond the healing touch of love.
You, my child, go back to your place in time

 and move with tide of Time.
Farewell, I must go."