An Uneventful Apocalypse

An Uneventful Apocalypse---

Wrapped around in the sheet of monsoon clouds
I listen
to the rumble drowned in rains
falling in a drifting rhythm
upon the window sills,
smell the earth, the wet grass blending with the sun-burnt dust.
Rains have brought a languorous calm.
Look at the sky;
the world is glorious.
News of sorrow or news of joy,
all must come through the ponderous sky.
I can begin to read the sky
like a gypsy reading her cards.
When the birds come back  I feel the earth
swell and surge in a tide of love.
Nothing is enough to quell the thirst.
Nothing will ever leave the swallow
as she warms up
to the spring left behind with a touch of sorrow.
The whole dominion of the earth and the sky
holding the breaths between love and grief
give me a longing which has no name.
I live isolate, uplifted, in an uneventful apocalypse.holding the breaths between love and grief
give me a longing which has no name.
I live isolate, uplifted, in an uneventful apocalypse.

Redemption

REDEMPTION

Somewhere in that land, a continent far away

Someone was locked in a paradox

Of love and hate, an ambiguous language, a tirade of anguish, plaintive cry

All aimed in the ether; it was aimed at me.

The deprivation, the longing, the fervent hope,

Meteors were hurled in the night and landed on my earth in my day.

I did not mean to steal what never belonged to me.

I simply watched, struck dumb by the fury;

It was as if my very existence was an anomaly that needed to be erased

My name was not divulged. I was a dark enemy for some uncommitted crime

Of  no origin in this life of mine.

The fumes so dark and vapours of venom

For days on end they chased my presence and filled with torpor

The air I breathed. O Distance, how unfathomed your space and the secrets you hide!

For days and nights I was engaged in a battle I did not want to fight

Somewhere beyond the horizon, the space of the ocean allotted to me,

I could hear the storm raging, relentlessly,

A small boat untethered and swirling in circles,

Hitting against unreal rocks, cursing,  scourging and floating on the tides of passion

With no respite clutching at the logs, clinging to planks that would not stay,

And the mid-sea raging under the sky.

Here from my shores I knew, it wasn’t  as doomed as it seemed to the boatman who could not row.

One after another of the logs slipped and swam

Away  to another shore, another land.

Gradually the oar was under control, the sea lost the rage and the fever died

And I watched from my shore a distant soul

Taking control of the roaming  vessel

The words carried a definite command

And the fever calmed.

It was all in the plan,

A growth, an evolution of someone caught in a whirlpool of angst,

And a final redemption and release for me.

My role in the drama, unexplained to this day

Is over now, and I can slip away and enjoy the bliss of my solitary Muse.

And now let my days in prayers pass
that the peace that I earned with a vicarious pain
may belong to me as my rightful grace
not be robbed for some reasons i cannot grasp or solve.
Let my angels visit me without a guilt in the heart
without having to intuit the path
out of the labyrinths of the archetypal riddles.

Thunder and earth and the rain again

And it has started again,

The thunder in the sky, the outpouring of rain

And all the irrelevant things that happen in between,

The thunder and the rain and the fearful longing;

It’s a downpour;

It fills me with fear

Although I have witnessed such happenings time and again,

It’s the irrelevant that precedes and persuades to believe

That the timbre is what endures. It does not wear away with the inclement air

The thunder reminds, the sound is a menace

And the rain follows gently to counter its claim

Over all that shivers and hides away.

The whisper, the gentle persuasion

Of the water falling

Down from the distant sky.

But the fear, the ancient, primeval , archetypal fear

The fever not subsiding, the ripples not dying,

And the rain taking over with a darkness conspiring.

One doesn’t know if this is swooning, drifting, slipping away

Or simply a synthesizer calling

In tune that sings with the rhythmic fall and the rise of the rain.

The aroma spreads; it drowns the rain,

The aroma of the earth that seeps in

Pervades and fills in the crevices

That  were waiting for the rain,

Waiting for the voice that calls again;

The voice, the rain, the darkening horizon and the melting sky,

And  the whole of me crying,

“Where am I?”

A Forest

The Forest

The road, an unholding,
and a rushing forth like a river,
the forest,alive primeval in its presence,
life abundant if you yield,
fierce and menacing if you miss the marks and overstep.
The lessons learnt by the ancestors, are still alive in my genes,
still the savage lurking in the dark,
can pounce of a sudden,
a reminiscence from the dark past,
soothing when accepted,
fiercely hostile if denied,
awesome, the forest is in its antiquity.
The forest stays in the  knowledge of its truth,
Deny it and it will rob you of your identity,
denude you of your certainty.
You need the courage of the impulse
to tread its path, the instinct that guards you,
not in the manner of an angel,
but like a tigress who once was your mother divine.
At the edge of the forest runs the road.
But the forest holds me and would not let me go.
No, I do not want to go.
This warm darkness soothes and heals.
These voices floating over time
are whispering my story of the ancient time.
It has something I did not know. I want to hear it till the end.
The road can wait or flow.
The forest has an ancient claim.
Until I yield, there is no release.

Somwhere The Sun...

Somewhere the sun is setting
and someone's time will plunge in the dark.
Somewhere the lark will sing
and the sun will rise in the cushions of silk
and velvets wrapped
Somewhere the earth will be pampering her family with goodies of sweet delight
Somewhere she will be shedding tears
over the sight of her children going to sleep
without a morsel of food in their mouths.

I pray the sun may love the earth
in all her days and the nights.

Haiku

A Haiku Inspired by +Fabien Todescato

The sand I held between my fingers,
and  allowed the sun to touch
and watched it filter down on the mound
in a shower of golden dust.