Gazing--Close and Far

Gazing...close and far


Here on the heath I knew only two secrets
that this earth of mine sways between
the light of the day and sleep
and I have lost the language of both.
The primeval knowing is lost
in the school of thought they called Reason.
I tried to grasp the alien language
and found when it was late
that I had lost mine own.
My worst nightmare is that I am standing
at the end of the escalators
in the crowded malls
and the wilderness of airports
not able to decide
which moment is the right one
to step on and step off
and that they have removed all the steps and the stairs.
Love draws me near and pain repels
and I have named them beauty and ugliness.
and the rest of the journey is a search
for a path away from both.
Is this hedonism the cause of my fall,my nemesis, I do not know.
I long to reach that valley of simple truths of love and peace
where love was love and peace was peace
and the rest was all a drunkenness.
My secret lies buried there
and I have lost the way.
I know the key lies somewhere there
and if I remove the overgrowth
I may find it still there.
My valley, my homeland beckons me.
Here from the island
I can do nothing but gaze,
surrounded by oceans all around
and sea-gulls circling overhead.

Sushama Karnik

Once Upon a Time in Japan Part 6 End

Matsuo knew; he lifted the child in his arms,
went close to the raft and bent.
He whispered to the child and said,
"Touch the log and say, I let you go,"
As the child bent low and touched the log
it suddenly made a slight move
and then the raft floated away
with the wind and the tide, far away.

End.

Part 5 Once Upon a Time In Japan

Take the child and go away.
Leave me alone by the night.
With each blow I will lose
the life in my limbs and finally, no more.
You mustn't see me die."

There seemed no way he could dissuade her
from her resolve to go it all by herself.
When he returned in the morning
the cottage was empty, nothing in sight
except the empty home.

He rushed with the child to the site
where once stood the Pine.
It was now lying on the ground.
They had chopped it into heavy logs
and were trying to load
all of that onto the raft and float
to the faraway shores of another land.

Matsuo and the boy stood aghast and watched
Matsuo with knowledge  and the boy in ignorance.
And Matsuo saw that the raft would not move,
however hard they tried; it just would not float.

Once Upon a Time....Part 4

Life was an idyll sung by angels
in the humble home; far away from the traffic hid,
their haven where nothing happened except simple peace and love.
As days went by, they were blessed with a son
who grew up strong and happy like the Pine in the wood.

But Time has its mists ,
woven sometimes by threads of dreams
and sometimes shattered by an axe.
On an evening when Matsuo returned home
he found his lady listless and sad.

She lifted her eyes with resolve and gave him
a look as if to break away
from a bond that she could not sustain;
as if her strength failed and nothing could hold her back.

"They are at it once again.
I could feel the first blow on my limb,
and this time it is the end.
It is time for me to go.
The parole has come to an end.

Once Upon a Time in Japan Part 3

The homestead clean, no lock on the door
and for once the house greeted him
with the aroma of a choicest spice and lovely rice
and a stranger peeping out shyly
from behind the screen!

Struck by wonder more than a surprise,
for such was the charm of the lady divine,
he stood as if etched in the frame of the door.
"Who are you"? he forced the words to come aloud.

The lady emerged out of the dark and said,
" I am the spirit of the Pine you saved.
I have been bestowed with a new life.
Now it's my choice, not a destiny,
to live with you and make you happy.

And with this she slipped in his arms,
fragile and trembling like the leaf of the Pine.

Once upon a Time in Japan part 2

and sooner or later I will have to migrate from this part of the wood where we are."

Matsuo shivered and looked at the tree.
The tree knew. Her branches in a tremor,
said it all to him.

The next day saw Matsuo early out of bed.
There was no one to question him about his intent
He stepped out looking all flushed and red,
with the knowledge in his heart of the dark portent.

He carried all the money stored in the pot,
and that day he stepped out without the axe.
With each new step he walked on the road
his heart grew stronger like a man who lacks
all fear and goes to his target with a single dart.

He knew those merchants who traded the tree
for timber hard and Matsuo knew what worked with them
was money in their hand, like gold in a silver platter.
He asked them for the price of his tree
and offered them twice what they asked.

The road back home was now brisk and light.
As he neared his tree on his way back home,
he stopped and lingered awhile, without a fright,
his heart at peace and his world all bright,
At the foot of his beloved Pine.

He touched the leaves tenderly.
A tremor ran through the Pine.
If it was a woman he would fain have kissed
and laid at rest the fear that ran through the helpless being.

The sap of life could be felt
by his fingers gently moving through the leaves,
so mighty was the upsurge and so eloquent was its body
speaking the language of its heart.

Matsuo smiled a gentle smile
as if to say that he knew it all.
But a greater surprise awaited his day
at the threshold of his humble hut.

Once Upon a time in Japan (A Folk Tale of Long Ago)

Once Upon a Time in Japan  (The Complete Version)

Once upon a time in a village in Japan where the timber grew
on a bank of a river, and the cuckoo sang and flew
in the quiet and open sky,
there lived a man silent and shy,
a woodcutter called Matsuo.

Every day he reached the heart of the silent wood
with an axe to chop, and stored under his hood
some bread and carried a flask of tea
and spent the afternoons in the shade of a tree.
And that was the tree he would never put under the
blow of the axe.

It was a fine pine, full grown and  shady,
cool in the summer and balmy in winter,
It grew and matured with Matsuo, strong and steady.
It spoke with a voice of the rustle of the leaves and the voice of a singer,
all in a silky undertone of a lover whispering secrets to the solitary
man resting at her feet.

Days went by and the tree and Matsuo grew in trust
believing in the bond that grew
and every day strengthened and blossomed
into an unspoken affirmation of love.

And one day a raven sitting on the branch of the tree,
sent across a message in panic
to another one in the far corner of the wood.
"Beware brother", it said, "The axe is going to fall on my tree,
 blow of the axe.

A Time to Save My love and My Being

Sushama Karnik

Shared publicly  -  11:30 AM

A Time to save our being

A wave of invasion carrying hate
spilling seeds of venom and sorrows in the wake,
the seeds planted long ago
have today begun to flow
in the intense blasts of rhetoric and oratory.
While trying to control the effect today
we are overtaken by another cause flooding into the wave
from the still more remote past.
Causes , immediate and causes unknown,
origins suddenly manifesting and crowding out reason,
pushing us to the farthest edge in the past.
Civilizations clashing, the abuse spilling blood,
questioning the meaning of innocence and pride.
Pride of identity and the pride of origin,
pride of owning antiquity,
the soil has forgotten everything else
except the growth of blossoms of rage.
The soil, lost virginity,the forgotten path,
identities plastered on the soil and the faces,
where is the place to love and save my being?

Untitled 2

'The moon clogs the milky way',
and the logs here in disarray?
I will gently brush the moon away,
put my logs in a finer way,
tend my garden and come away
to sing with you in the milky way.
There may be a frown  and a scowl
in the dark alley.
I will go bring the milky way
down here to shine
on every garden and every stray
ray of moon, and make it shine and sing in a different way.

Meera

Meera

Meera, a female dervish of Rajasthan,
you walked in the prison of your palace
with no fetters,
and before you could crawl or totter on your feet
you began to dance.
You were born without fetters,
but how would they know, the people who practised their own cult?
They made you a bride and wanted you to worship the silver trinkets they tied on your ankles.
You knew they were all warriors
who wanted no small troubles to distract them from the field of the battle,
the battle for survival and peace on their land.
You invented your own language, your lover and your bed.You poured out your love in a frenzy,
danced in the sanctum,;
You raised your feelings to insanity.
The walls of the sanctum collapsed.
The palace was too small to contain the rush of your river
in flood.
Your feet vibrated to the tune you heard, and heard alone.
They wanted to know who you sang for!
Maddening passion, a passion never content with the life they knew.
Could a woman love this way a human lover, they asked.
You pointed to the image of Krishna you first brought into your Mother's house, gifted to you by a wandering sage.
You grew with your idol;
you crossed childhood and became a woman.
He was there all along, a participant and witness of all the changes,
smooth, removing all encumbrance as you crossed each threshold of life.
He was the greatest catastrophe that happened to you,
and happened to all,
fatal for you and fatal for all.
You were a queen who could not rule.
And oh, you treacherous woman of all;
you failed in your duties as the wife to the Rajput prince
to whom you were given away as a bride.
Your defiance was amazing,
making the humans envious of God!
What a mystery, what an intrigue,
such as no palace would ever have seen!
They could not call it adultery, for that would be defilement of God.
They could not incriminate God, because that would have been blasphemy!
Meera, the greatest Master of all dichotomies!
You danced your way out of the prison-house of the palace,
drunk on the music you heard,
following the note of your harp with its single overwrought string.
You crossed the threshold of the palace to step into the wilderness of the roads and the alleys of the town.
It no longer remained a wilderness, nor did it remain a town.
They all could see your lover, enshrined everywhere,
He wore a crown adorned by a single peacock feather.
He was the deep blue of the ocean and the cloudy sky.
He dwelt in peace and played a tune on his flute
that descended down from the sky
and flooded the earth with a melody divine.
He was the one for whom you ran away from home, like a fish running into the mouth of a crocodile.
He could show you the infinite universe if he opened his mouth in a yawn. He was the one who had opened the swelling view of the cycles of aeons , life in eternal cycles of birth and death
to Arjun at the hour of his life on the battlefield,
a moment transcending fear and awe.
He was her lover, Life in Death and Death in life,
holding her hand,
firmly and tenderly,
never to let her go.
Never for a moment was she separated in life from the knowledge of this Life that killed all else.
The God, the ultimate Lover whom the world called Death
was her beautiful Lover.
A woman who was in love with death; why did they send her a potion of venom to drink? And she did drink it in faith that He would know
what to do.
And He did not want her to die. They called it a miracle of life
that she survived
and lived to tell the world
the  story of their amazing love.

Asymptote

Asymptote

Asymptote: the most unimaginable thing
to come
out of the sky and hit like a shooting star
reminding of my strife and struggle with the depth and precision of Math
and the most irrelevant things that pulled me away as I sat in the class
paying little attention to the task and the problem in hand,
drifting in the world of the unreal concepts and dreams.
Asymptote! The most poetic of all,
Even after all of college mathematics has evaporated, the asymptote still remains
like a lost memory from the nostalgic past,
like a lost sunshine coming back.
Someone brought it back: a cold definition :as all definitions are:
Asymptote: The distance between the curve and the line approaches zero (but is never zero) as both tend to infinity.
And who would say that mathematics lacked poetry?

A Bit of a Sky

A Bit of a Sky

Suddenly the scenario cracks open
revealing a lost alley.
A man trapped between the walls
slumped on the ground and wailing,
howling ,
howling in pain,
or in ecstasy
of finding a strip of a sky above?

Image :courtesy tanya dimitrova

Michael Tighe

Footprints in the sand

Footprints in the sand

The sun was at the peak
when I reached the shore
The sand was burnished gold and the ocean was on fire.
I was no moonlight lover.
The scalding hot fiery sun rebuked the earth and the sea and my feet were burning too.
But I needed to burn
in the pure white heat of the sun.
To be a sooth-sayer is no easy profession
and on that day I wanted to steer clear of all the obligations
to say the truth and say it say it all
and yet not hurt,
warning each of the one crucial step that needed to be taken
to escape the karma and begin anew.
My legacy of foresight was a hated curse
when all that they wanted
was to evade the life and procrastinate.,
evade the route and claim the end.
I could see into the way they abused
my gift of prophecy and make it into a trickery
whereby they could twist the arm of God.
I always told them to mind the time;
watch for the moment when the crucial turn
was going to change
the face of the things to come.
One crucial step, the step of rebirth--
but they dreaded to look it in the face.

The sand in the sun was a sea of gold and suddenly as I stood in the shadow of a rock I saw
right from the spot where I stood a track of footsteps in the sand could be seen, leading straight to the end of the shore.

I watched the marks ; and what did they say? My eyes never deceived about the signs.
And those were clearly the marks which said
that a divine being had walked here;
and to be sure, those were the markings that signified
the presence of an emperor!
An emperor walked barefoot
in the blinding sun and the scorching sand,
and walked all alone,
alone to the end of the land!

Far into the distance was a human figure,
a solitary being facing the sun and the sea.
And to be sure it had to be the emperor!
I almost ran till I reached the endless stretch of the sands.

And there he was, but what did I see? he was a humble monk, sorrowful and serene,
lost perhaps in the contemplation
of the things sublime!
How could I fail to read the language of the signs?

I fell at his feet in supplication; I wanted an answer.
"Holy man, I asked, Did you see an emperor come this way and go back?But i don't see the footprints of the one walking back.
How could my reading fail?

He smiled the most benign smile and said, "Your reading did not fail.
This sea and the sand and the footprints there
cut a path right up to here.
It was the allegory of a life written across the sands of time;
the allegory of choice--
the one crucial step that changes the face of time.
I am the emperor and I am the monk.
I was destined to be that--born to be the emperor , but one crucial step
taken at night,
changed it all. The one who you see was the emperor once.
Your insight was true but the blinding sun deceived you today. You failed to see that one single step
a decisive act that changed the emperor and this the truth--the monk now sitting here alone and away from all; an emperor once and now a mendicant begging for alms. And that was not fate; that was a choice."

A Meeting

A Meeting

He held the door open for her to walk in,
watching her all the way
as she settled on the sofa,
her face withered, no sign of knowledge
of where she was all those days.
He could see, it was somewhere far away.

The sag in her posture where once was a majesty
the eyes where once was a ray
of the quick insight and the mellow sympathy
now spoke of a different story.
He could see that the wounds and the scars were many,
too many for her to carry
and for him to help unload.

So many pages were lost or erased,
some eaten by the moth of time,
and some pages did not know that there exists a box called memory.

He did not know what to hold up to her,
a lamp or a mirror
whereby she could know
where to find her lost self,
by the light of the lamp
on the lost continent of her heart,
or in the reflection in the mirror
which would perhaps alienate
her further from the image of what she was.

And so they sat in the silence
of the space and the silence of the night,
not able to find a bridge
between a loss of language
and the loss of speech.

An Odyssey

An Odyssey

Tired of the journey by the ways of the land,
tired of the valleys and the deserts to cross,
tired of the fire and of the cannon,
I invented ways to escape by a voyage.
Tired again, of the high wind and the tides,
tired of the storms and the curses of the sirens,
I invented my routes in the sky.
Fear and terror reigned in the sky.
The boundaries not to be crossed,
loomed high over me in the treacherous sky.
The Odyssey  ends in unknown realms;
always some point of no return, but never the going back.

Looking Up And Looking Ahead

Looking Up and Looking ahead

"And all shall be well
and all manner of things shall be well"
and the fire and the rose shall be one.
He in the war-zone , having seen both,
the fire and the rose,
had only this to say.
The war has changed the face and the fields;
The cause is lost long ago.
Battles and skirmishes, a reason to kill.
People live huddled in fear,
not able to see a road ahead.
Pretending to possess the intrepid rage,
they sing in concerts and chill out in the dark
not conscious of the malice they inject in the rage
confined only to imaginary battle-fields and the subverted songs of the litany of fear.
Will one soul come ahead of his tribes and show the way to sink the histories and close the vaults,
seal the languages and declare them redundant for the ages to come?
Will one voice be raised above the cry of vilification of the foe
and the clamour to kill?
Old as we are , we seek a simple answer to our prayer,
Save the child that holds the baton,
save the food and the light and the roof.
Save the hearts of the children from malice and hate.

The Language That Fails

The Language that fails

Humor, the most profound and the subtlest of all utterance
is the first to offer itself for martyrdom.
The jester's tears hide behind a self-reflexive laughter.
The laughter and the martyr,
the body and the shadow
will walk the path,
an intrepid journey.
Like the divine lovers
inhabiting a lonely sphere,
they separate only when pierced through the heart:
the heart where love chose to wear the garb of irony,
the heart which knew the futility of reason.

The jester needs a Socratic interlocutor.
The tears fall from a different realm, and as they fall,
they change, and  what falls on the ears, is only laughter--
a laughter that was meant to numb the pain and fear.
Alas, to be a jester is a fateful choice
in a world where languages , alien and dense,
are locked in a conflict for ascendency.

My God

My God

My god is full of stars.
Billions of galaxies out there
and I, a human standing here.
Billions of stars coming into being, evolving and dying,
and I a human,
know they are there.
Light streaming in with a vast history behind,
and yet reaching me and keeping me alive.
So many galaxies and so few humans
that for each of us
a galaxy there.
My God is full of illusions.
He hides his stars behind whirlpools of dust.
I, a particle of dust
and yet he gives us a chance to shine
with the knowledge of his wonders that never cease to surprise.

I watch the taste of coffee

"I watch the taste of coffee in her eyes"

Rivers of Time cannot be reversed
except in my own Time.
And by now I have come to accept
the knot which I know I cannot untwine.
With a cup of coffee in my hand
the river flows backward as I watch
the taste of coffee,
at first on the tip of the tongue ,
then slowly twirling along the deep throat,
and when swallowed completely,
a whirlpool and the swirl--
I cannot say , of memories,
of moments perhaps,
in time and out of time.
Why do people philosophize
about which Time is real?--
Time In or Time Out/
It is just a bout of moments lived
in profusion.
Born anew, every rebirth an immersion in Time,
every immersion a rebirth in memory.
Nirvana is not for me.
"I sit on the banks of the river,
and I forget and forget", I heard someone say.
When memory attains Timelessness
it is one with eternity.
Nothing is lost in the flow.
I watch the taste of coffee
and live in the flow.

The Land and the Sky

 The Land and the Sky

Under the immensity of sky
and horizon extending to infinity
I run to get to the shore, alone and dry
With nothing but a shadow to accompany.
The waves, I do not know, whether chasing me or receding,
it is the land that is pulling me away from the sea.

The Winter

The winter was hard
The snow covered all
the traces of footfall
of those who walked alone
who walked alone in the snow
and the winter hard,
were all wiped out of the way.

The fence that separates
one home from another,
now barely visible,
will soon sink under the snow.

That is the way two hearts live in the winter of life
the fences buried under the snow
and yet no way to reach out.