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You Leave for the Mountains

You leave for the mountains
and step into the clouds.
White clouds cover you softly
and you grow back into a little girl.

Now you belong to the mist
and settle on the far side
from where only echoes travel back—
one more time an ancient messenger arrives.

I struggle to decipher what seems so simple,
I am back at the start of a journey
betrayed by language,
you have left for the mountains.

Meanwhile, there are scattered hamlets.
There are gardens, white fences, porches,
and large glass panes divide the night into cubes.
There are people and homes and warm fires

and silence surrounds them.
There are two nights at two different points—
they are awake and separate.
Tonight the snow is fresh and delicate.

The cranes stretch their necks to caress moonlight.
The flames glow along your limbs
and light up your lovely face
somewhere far, far away in the mountains.

First publication acknowledgement – in Poetry Selection ‘The Boatman of Murshidabad’ by Madhu Kailas published by Aleph Book Company in Jul, 2021

When The Universe is Full and Bursting

If you have held a piece of straw or a dry twig
by one end of it and lent it to the wind—

You would have felt how fragile it is
how the vulnerability is everywhere,
it enters at the point of touch through your fingertips
and consumes your being in a faint trembling.

The wind too trembles to take what is given to it.

After she turns the last corner
and your eyes can no longer follow her—

That is when the universe is full and bursting.
That is when the universe is empty and giving.
That is when you find the strength to look life in its face,
how beautiful and full it is,
how infinitely beautiful it has always been.

© Madhu Kailas Nov 2022
Mumbai 15.11.2022

The Punch Magazine – 2023

Turquoise Ankles

You stepped into my dream
with luminous turquoise ankles
adorned by gold ornaments.

I could only see part of you
that was outside the broken egg shell.
Rest were your foot prints

of ‘Alta’ in deep silence.
When the moon broke
and splashed on your form

waves of milk rose through your eyes.
Like ‘Rajanigandha’ stunned
by its own intensity—

my heart was still. Abruptly,
what was left behind was ‘your absence’,
and two deep breaths at two ends.

Indian Literature

Truth of Stones

You sit in silence and contemplate
the nature of inanimate things.

Slowly you become an empty shell.
Two spaces flow toward each other—

where they merge, you dissolve and cease.
There is a new way of being

when you become one with inanimate things.
The stone and its shadow are sentient too.

When you speak to the stone
you hear your voice in a new and fresh way

till the monologue becomes dreary
and grows on you like an insipid sheath.

You fall quiet and two silences flow into each other,
you become one with the stone.

You watch the transient life of a stone’s shadow.
How its contours and its depth of darkness change,

it moves toward the end and does not fight the light.
You close your eyes and see two lights

immerse into each other.
You and a stone and its shadow come alive together.

Outlook India e-version 2023
Indian Literature

The Parrot’s Theatre

Our explorer friends
chanced upon a floating orb
inhabited by monkeys and apes.

On docking they exclaimed,
“My goodness, what a mess
they have made of this place!”

A parrot perched in the greens
snapped in nonchalant bliss,
“My goodness, what a mess!”

The monkeys split in glee.
In endless frolic and screech
they lapped up the parrot’s jest.

Seeing the explorers troubled
the leader made a stern comment,
“It’s all the parrot’s fault!”

The parrot perched in the greens
snapped in nonchalant bliss,
“It’s all the parrot’s doing! Wring its neck.”

The monkeys broke in wild applaud.
Started singing in parrot’s praise.
Their leader donned a sagacious face.

Our explorer friends left in haste.
In baffled awe they said,
“They have figured it out. We do not understand.”

‘The Boatman of Murshidabad’, 2021

Purpose

It is not about the trees and the stars,
and the play of the sun amid our hearts.
Today, it is not about them.
Butterflies and flowers too. They reside
in the realm of limp embellishments.

The notebook cover is an illustration
of random shapes, curves and colors.
Winning to the eye; but it’s only a cover.

What hosts life cannot live it for another.

There are blank pages between the covers.
I have to seek them. And read
deep into each grain of their fibers.
A man painstakingly bound these pages
with a grooved, leathery hand.
Coarse white thread stitches his name nowhere.

Some pages scream for a stroke; some for scribble.
They wish to be defiled. They want a new purpose.

Many are already filled.
They wait patiently to be revealed.
Each page is a prelude to the one coming after.

Quiet Sunday morning – I hear spiders.
Legion of spiders are taking over our apartment.
I write encapsulated by a silvery web.

Each day we walk into the innocence of a guileless page.

Very soon I will be at the market to buy a contraption.
A naïve bamboo-stick
with a benign tuft of soft jute fibers.
There are spiders to be killed.
There is life to go on with.

New Mexico Review, December 2016

Minimal Arrangements

Constellation of ashes peel off in the winds
and etch my trajectory
after I have burnt a life
in blue-lined ocean-eyes, and my thirst
has slaked into vapour on fiery stones,
after the passing of
many elaborate arrangements
of seeking music and finding joys
in endless seraphic dance.

Scattered and restless,
I rush toward you—
the last of the freedom songs
that sings of the sky and the forests
and the mountains and the rivers,
and sings of pretty girls carrying secret springs,
the seasons’ wine invigorating our blood,
and plays the music of love the last time—
luring me to death
in your peace-shades
that you assemble like an ancient art
of flutes shaping breath and
percussion of how the heart beats on.
And fruits ripen and burst,
the seeds scatter among fallen petals
and voluptuous colours of feathers
are left behind by unseen, untamed birds.

You, the master of my life
arrive to teach me love and
make minimal arrangements of my departure.
I want to weave in all your strands
in my life from origin, all over again.
I am only a frantic straw in torrent of time,
travelling through
the mountains and ashrams of Rishikesh—
you help me part open the blue sky
and show me the path
to the end of all my joys and tears
and my famished life goes to sleep,
if only, O’ my beloved, in your arms it sleeps.

In New Mexico Review Fall 2021

I Come for Myself

I pass through many hands before
I am returned to myself. I step up to receive
with one last push of strength and pride,
my sad yellow eyes drained of youth’s sparkle

and deep folds of skin
that heavily weigh down on my smile
into half-finished joy, and a string of forgetting.
I speak calmly, “I have come for myself.”

Now I start to sense – how it is built and broken,
the geometry of sharp edges
and stains of blood and sweat that dry
and how the flesh rearranges itself

and then disappears. All the years,
many faces at work and I can’t find myself.
The stones grow dense with cold,
suffering in silence in company of stars –

who keep distance filled with vacuum
and forget to tell me – I die in their hands.
I find a glint lost on the dewed grass,
the only one worth seeking,

we are locked in our eyes under a starry sky,
pushing the universe out, beyond its limits,
like children at play
and the Gods are watching us.

‘The Boatman of Murshidabad’, 2021

Darjeeling

I hear your demure flute
Play through you
Around you in chiffon lightness
Trace your undulations
Levitate in your bosom
Like settling soul
Float across your valleys
In a downy string of pearl notes.
Now sad, now joyous
Through many births
Play endless, endless, endless!

Hugging numerous pulsating lights
Like fireflies loving your bodies
In silver speck sighs.
I hear your demure flute
Caress hamlets asleep
Swaddled in your green peace.
The innocence of beautiful lives
Born of tea leaves.
Pine trees rise on their toes
To kiss closed eyes of the sky.
Now I kiss your forehead
And hold you
Near and nearer.
The velvet aroma of your skin
Dreams in melancholy notes
From peak to peak
Play endless, endless, endless!

Oh! Darjeeling!
Oh! Mountains of my dreams!
How you come alive in me
How you fill me
With your mountain bodies
How you brim me
With your mountain notes.
In a gnawing urge
To come alive in you
To be born as a tea leaf
Held softly between your lips.

Langlit, ‘The Boatman of Murshidabad’, 2017, 2021

Voice of the Hills

Now the hills call (again), rising into the sky
laced with crimson and ink blue sashes.
Bodies blossom in soft earth thirsting to burst,
yearn for the stars, new and gallant.

A lava heart, so gentle and tame
in arms of evening slipping along its curves,
in tender cupped palms hold the day’s song
of birds, and courtship of bees and flowers.

Spent petals strewn on lichen, only a day to burn
its wanton colours, it’s brazen lips, deathly and fresh
touch stones warped in deathless silence.
On the forest floor, in care of the hills their story tells.

I listen to the distance, always in mist and receding,
like a cruel strain of nostalgia in unending path
does not reach, does not speak. I pluck a star
and plant in the hills’ heart. A lone refuge flickers.

The Boatman of Murshidabad – Aleph, July 2021

I Bring You Lilies

The few moments I get with you
once in few years,
I bring you lilies.

On my way I stop and I choose carefully
each flower,
I feel the soft resilience of the buds yet to bloom,
the smooth and thick flesh of petals
that have spread handsomely,
the crispness of their edges,
and the symmetry of how they have parted,
how they hold a cup of empty space in the centre,
that is hope.

I bring you lilies,
holding them close to my chest
as I try to keep my balance in the rain,
through the narrow streets of Fontainhas in Panji,
washed and glassy
with bright ochre and orange walls of Portuguese architecture
wrapping them in an impressionist painting.

At a distance, through the refractions of rain
like a mirage you are somewhere there,
as I walk toward you
I hold the lilies tight to my chest,
so that they are not hurt, they are not maimed.

The white ones hold their silence—
they must speak, they must sing, they must live
while I am away,
like the pink lily in the centre with streaks of red
that carouses in the wind in a brash way.

At the end of a long journey and timeless wait,
I bring you lilies
to sit in the shades of your kindness.
You remove them stem by stem and cut them neatly,
and place them in a glass vase.

We sit down for a few moments
and look out into the rain-washed garden.
The lilies in the glass vase sit with us in silence.
I wonder in mute joy if you will ever know
how much I love to bring you lilies,
time and time again.

Indian Literature

In the Comfort of Blue Horizons

In the comfort of blue horizons, and far from the ruins
of my heart, I learn to sing in your praise—the first word.

To an empty audience whose clamor of desires
fade into accelerating distance.

I arrive to open my silence at your feet
in a solitary ceremony contained in a new world.

For long, I had wanted to grow up into a street peddler
selling stories of three sentences.

One, to fill my belly to a point of sated belch.
Two, to sprinkle laughter and become spring fever.

Three—remained the unfathomable silence
in exile for a lifetime.

A quest, a crusade, a devotion for nothingness.
Quiet streets of unfinished stories in thick settlements.

Eyes of bricks, eyes of glass, eyes of people—
in thick of human cries, I am invisible to my own eyes.

In the comfort of blue horizons,
I arrive to open my silence and listen.

Pub – The Bosphorus Review – Mar 2022

Accidental Worship

Long drawn shadows are also children of the sun.
Cast far away on a landscape faintly warm
like the inheritance of emotions in our being.

Till, one day—we sense a ‘dukkha’ in us
in an elemental form
that defies all boundaries and origin.

One day, we discover a tenderness
that flows through our limbs and through our eyes
with a subtle tremble of disbelief.

That we are so close to our devotion,
that the sun also rises from within
and immeasurable beauty imbues us with blessing

and it spreads through us
like a song of devotion and lights a lamp of joy
in accidental worship.

Usawa Review 2022