Train Ride at 6.00 AM
On a train to somewhere
days beat their wings over
the face of a superbly round sun
like untracked Vs of birds at dawn
Time ravishes and ravages
everything: as black ink from
the bottle is used to write the word
Time, the color of a few strands
of hair changes to grey, to white
These sleepy faces sitting in these bucket seats will be different next time as they emerge from the dark of distance into a changing sky in which one always hears a horizon note*, to changing paper headlines with their ceaseless burning cities
And the poet is left here hefting words as sparrows build nests season after season under the rafters of a witnessing sky
* The steady drone note, usually produced by a tanpura, heard in traditional Indian music is sometimes called the horizon note
My Poems
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Aural Cartography
But every beginning
is only a continuation
and the book of fate is
always open in the middle.
-Wislawa Szymborska in "Love At First Sight"
[a] Till yesterday in the rain (How does rain murmur In that country of yours?) One could only hear The lone voice of a wood Thrush, calling out in its Flutelike voice, A question followed by An uncertain answer, Deep in the emerald summer Woods, over and over.
[b] This changed today, When two song sparrows Flew under the overhang Above the west window Chirping to one another, A melodic conversation as they ferried Bits of wet grass, a length of thread, Black twigs somewhere to the heights Beyond any line of sight.
[c] Two other sparrows, each of whom had Wondered if they were solitary Wood thrushes for so long, also met Today, under the rafters of clouds, In the overhang of rain, And sang out in a three note song, A new beginning from the book of fate, which was lying open at a poem.
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Sleep Photograph
The trundle of trains across
Old river barrages is the sound
You wake to as rain lashes
Windowpanes, and thunder
Briefly transmutes crape myrtles
Into the sentinel gulmohars,
Which stood outside your
Window in that far country
Of trains and river trestles.
Note: It is somewhat ironic that roughly around the time I was writing these lines this morning, to capture that distant sound of trains, halfway across the world, in a different time zone, people were crawling out of a massacare in Bombay's train system. I can only send peace out to the dead, the maimed, and the living.
My Poems
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