THE RAVEN AND THE BARDIC SONG

The Raven And The Bardic Song

On a cold and colourless winter dawn
the raven  turns his greyish neck
and watches for the sign of the truant sun
blinking capriciously
from behind the screen,
and the raven recalls the promise made
long ago to a poet of the yonder days
that he would sing a bardic song
for the new-born sun on the crest of the hill.
Though the moment has come
the sun would still not take the hint
from the raven who watches for the new age to come.

Image Credit Johnny Marega

UNTITLED VII

UNTITLED VII
Bulging shadows
over ocean's waves;
and the ocean agitating, swearing
to the gods in the sky.
Hypnotizing, mesmerizing
roaring waves and the maddening sea;
I have always watched from the steady unwavering coast,
imaginary spirits reigning over  the waters and the sky.
Distracting images of mermaids, mariners, siren's songs;
Haunting, casting a spell
on the memory and the mind;
bewitching, like a rock risen waywardly in the place where the tide
ebbs and rises again.
Withdraw from the waves and just watch,
everything change and everything motionless and still.

Sushama Karnik

Kostas Michalis originally shared:

18.01528 g/mol

"Intimacy is making known to a close friend what is innermost.  In other words: intimacy is most essentially a sharing of innermost qualities.  In nonhuman relations, the inseparability derives from the inherent qualities of the things themselves."

"We speak of the intimate relations between flora and fauna in a particular ecosystem, for example, or between matter and energy in the context of particle physics.  In such cases, we cannot fully understand one side of the pair without considering the other.  although we can conceptually isolate the two through abstraction, they are really intertwined: we cannot divorce what one is by nature from what the other is by nature. " ( Intimacy or Integrity : Philosophy and Cultural Difference / T. Kasulis)

Image: Weight of Water / “There are moments in your life when you know that the sentence that will come next will change your life forever, although you realize, even as you are anticipating this sentence, that your life has already changed. Changed some time ago, and you simply didn't know it.”  (A. Shreve)

UNTITLED IV

UNTITLED 4

Flaming cities, frozen mountains,
glaciers running down the slopes,
boulders falling, tides rushing on
into the land,
Things that happen and overtake,
terminating life in an instant
are far less fearful than the atrocities committed by man against man.
Times revolve; come full circle;
in between are the spaces for a pause;
a pause for retrospection for the continents drifting apart
in empathy, understanding and compassion. While we are still within the range of hearing and feeling one another
the lightening of understanding has to occur;
the pauses are neither frequent
nor do they last long.
Times revolve, come full circle;
in between are the spaces for a pause.
We, the creatures of the moment,
but creators of heaven and hell;
the hells last and burn
longer than the heavens have the time
to resuscitate and heal.
The forces , incumbent, a lambent sky overhead,
watch for the moment to overtake
as the humans slumber
before awakening from the agitated sleep.
The trouble is that I, the solitary one cannot connect;
cannot stop the addiction
to power, the intoxication of rhetoric,
the malady of lonely struggles
as households crumble under the weight of the words,
as the only WORD is silenced and vanishes beyond the event-horizon.
Times revolve, come full circle;
what do we , what do I, do with the pause
in between?

The Darkness

The Darkness
The darkness speaks when the light cannot.
Darkness , the space you create ,
and once created does not dissolve.
Darkness, soothing falsehoods,
comfort of dependence,
a part of the heritage bequeathed.
Darkness, so full of narratives
in the intimacy of dark,
the portals, opening and closing,
sudden lightening, clearings of a moment,
which the clinging of the daylight could not show.
Darkness, the doors open and close
and no sound made,
no sight of the visitors who come and go
with no imprint of the presence left behind.
Darkness, dark as the moon eclipsed, to shield
the caves where you need to retreat and breathe.
Darkness, I love to lie in your  nocturnal embrace,
 calm, mystifying, elusive,
a night's enclave,
 your tight clasp over my weary soul,
my body resting in the illusion;
the illusion of cessation of all my being
and that is all the truth I need to know.

Small Pleasures

Small Pleasures

That cottage lay huddled in trees
mangoes and jasmine and chrysanthemums
and the scent in the tea of all of these.
And the tea we drank on that day
as if drinking tea was all that was there
 to life and the cottage on that day.
There we needed no ceremony,
the kettle that danced and sang away
the song of steam, the aroma of tea-leaves
over-burnt as they stealthily flew
over to jump into the quivering flames of the crude stove,
the cups and saucers with broken ears and the edges dashed away,
grown wiser in the hands that served
the elixir of life, day in and day out,
to whoever came to rest for a day.

Sameer Koul originally shared:

Hope this is in sync with ur requirement of that lovely poem😊😊

Sameer Koul's photos

AND NONE SHALL LIVE AND NONE SHALL SLEEP

AND NONE SHALL LIVE AND NONE SHALL SLEEP

And none shall sleep
and none will live
when the dawn will break on the crest of the hill.
Because the one who revealed the answers to your quest
was denied justice.
The cold tyrant, the one who holds the humanity
under the command of the sword
must stand by the promise made to the prophet
who was the prophet of love.
He was a prophet in graciousness, the saint in compassion,
the heir to be
the claimant to the heart of the throne of love,
and the tyrant queen retreats
from the promise to surrender her throne
to the prince who has answers to the riddles that bog the humanity.
She retreats in fear of the divine justice
that demands the marriage of power and love.
She believes in the age-old precept that governs her mind:
that Power must not yield
and Love must never be allowed to win.

And alas, the Prince of all answers
has asked the queen to guess his sacred name
before the day breaks behind that hill,
and if she does, his life will end
and if she cannot
she must stand by her word and marry
the Prince who abides by Love.
And the God of the Political Machine
has diabolical rules to perpetuate Power.
The tyrant queen issues a decree :
"None shall sleep and none shall live
until and unless his name is found."

And as is typical of our times,
the Prince of Love who has almost won
waits in the moonlit night.
The tyrant defers justice as long as she can,
and the people can neither sleep nor live
in the perpetual nightmare of uncertainty.

Love For What It Was

IT WAS LOVE FOR WHAT IT WAS
Like meadow flowers
sitting still by the sidewalk
on a night when the moon
is in full bloom
sometimes love blossoms
when nothing is groomed
in the vacant mind,
to seize upon and brood.
You just notice something passing by,
absently,
much later when gone too far on the way
you know
it was love for what it was.

Ron Silvia originally shared the image

Goodnight everyone  

MEADOW FLOWERS

Aug 31, 2016

Like hope they wait
the meadow flowers,
listening to the murmur of the brook,
like throngs of souls who have neared the bridge
to cross the gateway, and reach to the land of dreams.

Image credit: Beau Beauregard

Beau Beauregard originally shared to Langiappe:

The Moon-child

THE MOON_CHILD

THE MOON CHILD FALLEN IN THE POND

One moon was sailing across the sky
while I was looking at the pond.
Ripples swished and the wind whistled
and the island of bamboo sang.
I looked closely at the moon
rolling and swerving from end to end
in the babbling ripples of the pond.
I stooped dangerously close to the edge
of the pond to pick up the fallen moon.
I brushed apart the willows and reached for the darling moon.
It suddenly jumped up and splashed over
all the wonders of the waters at me.
Just as I felt I had caught
the moon by its wet water-soaked robe
it gave me a smile and danced.
I am no moon my dear; the one you are looking for
is sailing across the sky
far from the world where you and I
are wading through waters and the sand filled land, a far cry
from the world where you and I belong.
Let it sail across the cloud, across the sky.
Tonight it is full, and tonight will not last long.
Small the hours, long the journey, let that moon sail away.,
Far away till the break of the day.

Darlene Walsh  shared: the image

Beautiful moon!

Lost Treasures

Nov 8, 2015

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THE WEAKEST STRAND

A black shell lying in the sand
when the sand was moist and cool
and the sea was dark between
the two breakers forming a screen,
and the mist was all about
me and my memories
of the sea and the shells and a few sand-castles in between.
Gathered shells have this black one,
now glistening,
stored with some purpose then,
but now when all the knick-knacks are lost
and this black one is what has remained behind
I simply cannot recall why
I stored this mighty little jewel
for another day.
Inanities now, and then some  awesome finds;
the weakest strands make the strongest ties.
I shall still store this mighty little jewel for yet another day

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Sushama Karnik

Seasons

Nov 3, 2017

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DOWN THE ALLEYS AND LANES

Shadows around the house,
pensive, moving, ephemeral, soft.
The backyards humming with the presence of birds.
My heart still moves there and rests in the shadows.
What I gather and store in the folds of garment
is going to be washed away in the river
and then to the waiting arms of the sea.

The yearning, ceaseless, for the things that have been.
The whole day long I lived with the sea.
The alleys and the backways lined with the trees,
all led to the final sea at noon.
I watched it glimmering white.
From the hill on the shore,
from the ramparts of the ancient fort,
then from the seaside cafe
I watched the tranquil backwaters
tossing in the breeze the sunkist waves.

Time rolled over the quiet shore.
The wings of the swarms of dragonflies
and the waves that gently touched the rocks
was all the music that happened there.
The road back home was long.
The moon which sailed along in the sky
stopped for awhile in the track.
The moon smiled a cryptic smile.
A stopover for the night.
A lifetime washed away.

Thanks Souheil Ghammachi for the image

Originally shared by Souheil Ghammachi

There’s an ocean
inside of me.
Put your ear against
my chest and listen,
it rages for you 💕
~ Johnny Nguyen

Photo via WhatsApp by J.S.
Mediterranean shore at Tyre
Lebanon

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• 
  Hector Merced

  Happy Friday dear +Sushama Karnik​

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  Nov 3, 2017

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• 
  Sushama Karnik

  Thank you, dear +Hector Merced Good morning :-))

  REPLY

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  Nov 3, 2017

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• 
  tony langmach+1

  +Sushama Karnik
  Amazing...
  Nice weekend wished Indian potress & maybe you see the Full-moon..`)

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  Nov 3, 2017

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• 
  Souheil Ghammachi

  Beautiful poem!
  It’s a photo of a friend of mine in Lebanon...
  But she’s not on G+... so she didn’t mind when
  I posted it... she was pleased... of course I asked
  for her approval... she said “Ok but you write something
  beautiful “ ... and now you reshared it and you wrote your
  poem... she’s more than satisfied 😊👍

  REPLY

  
  Nov 4, 2017

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• 
  Sushama Karnik+1

  Convey my love to your beautiful friend. I am happy that she liked it. +Souheil Ghammachi

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The Woof And The Warp

Between day and night,
between remembrance and forgetting,
between waking and sleeping,
we weave this tapestry of life remembered.
Between the intertwined strands of forgetting and recall
we hold the woof and the warp,
the flowing lines of the arabesque scroll.
The day unravels what the night has woven.
We hold in our hands, loosely and weakly
a few fringes of the lived life.
We turn our days into nights
and at night we work in darkened rooms
under artificial light of the lamp.

Out of the morning mist
a road will emerge.
Around the bend,
a hoarding will shine.
That is the bend where roadsters stop
confused after the passage through the night.
A sudden turn and the traveler halts.
The bends around the corner always hold
the traveler, and the path plunges in a renewed dark.
I love these bends on the sudden mornings on the roads,
the markers, the signs, the clearing of the mist;
they fill me with wonder. They are the reason why we travel
on and on, wakeful through the sleepless nights.

Thanks for the image +pasajul de noapte
Probably my last post on G+

Originally shared by pasajul de noapte (noapte) - 1 comment