Night

A lone flamingo shrieks in its sleepCausing ripples in the night's stillness .

The tree in darknessThe tree waited in the darkStudded with white pearlsOf sleeping flamingos.

Precursor of rain

Dark liquid cloudsCoagulated around the moonDrawing a nebulous circlePresaging silver rain .

The temple bell

The temple bell rang and rangWith its thick tongue in fever.

August sky

Clusters of acacias that had grownWaterless under the skin of the earthSpread their ghostly hair evenlyIn the rainless , blazing August sky.

Time and again

I was just asking timeOnce again.Because my words had fallenInto night.They were not luminous.When Rilke dropped themThey were.But they fell into the sameAggregate of darkness.

In the bear-hug of darkness

You do not see bears from bushesAnd where the earth ends And the dark of the sky begins.

At the death ceremony of a relative in Eluru

Trains bring people to river canalsWhere death is a mere after-fact

Submerged in flowing green waters.

Thinking of my my dead father

Consciousness reverse-flowsReinforced by the fluid presentIn horizontal ether-filled spaceHe happened half a century agoWhile I exist in finite space .

When death happened of my driver's father

In the meanwhile there is this driver's dramaWhen he gets into train to see ailing dad He hears dad already dead of too much sugarAnd look,death is so sweet and so prosaic!

Flickr. dreams

I have several black and white "flickr" dreams Nobody touches them because they areJust my black and white dreams ,not theirsAnd it is the colored ones they are after.

These are no images for nest making

When one tries to get back to the museOne is steeped ,like stick in the mud.One keeps twittering like the night birdDeeply afraid that the wind comes,In the sea of night, bird does not see birdBut fallen leaves and broken twigsThese are no images for nest making.

What the old trees do not realize

The trouble Is they want to remain homes

To the many homeless evening-birds

Which incessantly chatter to slum kids

Pouring out of their improvised shanties

With tin roofs glistening in the sun.

They do not realize even in their death

That our gardener’s three-stone stove

Is waiting impatiently for their dry logs

To arrive in its enormous, crackling fire.

I stir along with the train and thought

She the train better stop thinking violent

Not puffing like her coal-eater ancestor

While mind walks slowly like the blue bird

That went up and down on the telephone wire.

Train thoughts

Train-fans stir cold wind and winter air

Shaking shadows of several recently fed men

Bringing out guttural sounds from sleep’s depths.

Dreams spoil their fun through monster bridges

And dark tunnels in the mountain’s wombs.

Train thoughts

As she writes her history on two parallel lines

In the black parchment all the while erasing it

I collect exquisite shadows of the night’s silence.

Myths

We have our myths,carefully polished

Over Time's washed stones of the riverbed .

Our accumulated minds enormously meshed

As a haystack of shared consciousness.

The road maker

This man turned the drum of liquidThe fires crackled and black smokeWent up above the tree and red wallSmooth and black like a snake.

noontime stories

trying to read storiesin the noontime,whenleast rain is expectedthere is a hot chimeraon the tarred roada lone woman with ametal pot on headpoetry strikes nowin the whir of the head,a body posture replying.

We tried not to dream

We tried hard not to dreamWhile awake and in sleepWe leaned against the parapetThe shadows seemed to tease;The sounds were unduly harshAnd the sights mere fragments.