The hibiscus

A poem a day
A.J.Rao
Contents
Chariot day 1
Back 2
Making home 3
Nostalgia 4
Garden 5
The fall 7
Fool-proof 9
Shadows 10
R.I.P. 11
Layers 12
Lake 14
sleep 15
Birds eye views 16
The painted sun 17
Fathers day 18
Phone noise 19
Out of doors 20
Body still 21
Wet blanket 22
Short stories 23
The lock-keepers privilege 24
Train journey 25
Each body 27
Just one years rain 28
Remains 29
City sky 30
In a manner of speaking 31
Private rain 32
Last rains frogs 33
1
Chariot day
It would rain on this chariot day
And gods went out yearly riding.
Their wood is the nature of things
The very tribal jungle from where
We had come,from our ancestors.
Their chariot will roll on our lives
The way towards ancient dreams.
We love to die under its wheels
We had lovingly made all of rain
From jungle wood recently dead.
We shall some day burn as wood,
Our ashes lighted by their smiles.
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2
Back
The ravine it would easily sink
Wavering trees and dried grasses.
The morning is its orange sorrow
Delineated with the downy fingers
And you reach the end of sound
As you do on a spiked pipal leaf .
A hair creeps like your darkness
Down your fingers for silk touch,
The birds bleary eyed rain cries
Echoed in a knotted end of cloud.
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3
Making home
We make this extended home ,
Immensely compressed space,
A light rolled in endless carpet
A shadow infinitely multiplied,
The poetics of our home space.
Dust atoms descend a skylight
In tiny suns creating our space
Expanding our eyes everywhere,
Corners puffing like dream cats
That self-destruct behind doors.
Doors are brooms to sweep light
Off its shadows and shadows fall
In abyss of light from a balcony
To come back for ripe apple sun
To live a world and die by moon.
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4
Nostalgia
With some more years before
Fading pearls of eyes,old man
Easily traverses memory lane,
A dusty lane of a quilted street,
In sleepy hollows of a rag bed.
A rag bed shall invoke pleasant
Would-have-beens, challenges
At a summit top of endeavour,
The red fluttering rag one had
Sunk in snowy conquests peak
On path strewn with hangings.
Such is power of rags of words
Thrown at the winds at random
That they turn acted out events
To be nostalgic about some day.
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5
Garden
Garden is a fragrance remembered,
Soft grass crawling with slow snail,
Birds singing of changing the world
While I was at the computer trying
To change it before the cuckoo did.
Garden is a wood tree standing erect
As if it was alive and pretending life,
Hosting evening birds chatting away
With slum kids playing street cricket.
Fence is a running shadow of bush,
Hiding controverting garden lizard
That had agreed with your nothing
As it vigorously waved vertical head
To every polemic from your poetry.
The spider is your worlds wide web
That collected seasons rain pearls
Sparkling for proud sun moments
But gone when you returned from
An olfactory inspection of jasmines.
Garden is mama reading in a swing
From lifes pages that would be ice,
A fires ashes and a rivers waters,
A deaths fragrance remembered.
7
The fall
this fat lady is of the fall
in the dark Kolkata night
of uncle no more in air.
the fall could have been
branch -arresting, if only
there were tree between
balcony and an earth ma.
It is the telephone wires
that did it- arresting bit
the fall went on,unfailing
the way to mother earth
on the pavement where
a mother earth smelled
a garbage of old lettuces
for dogs boys to scrounge
at break of smoked dawn.
the falling lady goes on
with her daily business
her childrens marriages
the duties of a grandma
she owes to an earth ma.
about bones life flowed
blood flowed to gravity
but fall goes on in body,
the stuff of her dreams
and in my own dreams
8
an image of endless fall.
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9
Fool-proof
We will join ranks with them.
In return they will mourn us
When later our turn comes ,
Fool-proof arrangement for all.
Heavy mohalla women make
Breast-beating into a fine art.
They do it to some fine music.
The air is rife with fresh death.
Be assured that in this bargain
Nobody shall feel unmourned.
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10
Shadows
Please reflect how a light source
Casts its own shadow on the wall
Crawling in lizards food waiting
To cast its own briefest shadows .
A lantern waved shadows in wind
On the mud wall ,then something
That made the sum of all its parts
For a child of a nights landscape
A child who grew todays old man
Who carries all those emptinesses
A shadow that carries all shadows
As if shadows are only real things.
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11
R.I.P.
Sleeps eyes now pray for souls
All goat souls on move , those
That body-hang on the lakeside
For Saturday dinner, the goats
That have no independent souls
To rest in peace , with no words
To compensate for loss of body.
Diners have souls , their bodies
Living on hanging goat bodies
That have no independent souls
Stirring a mild lakeside breeze.
The dinerss souls rest in peace
As many words for bodies lost.
Only souls rest that have words
To stuff all those empty spaces.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: R.I.P.
12
Layers
There was the rattle of the machine
And a vigorous thump,on its flanks
Another noisy night thump to quiet
The dusty cooling fan inside C.P.U.
Letters separated by layers of dust.
They fly away, keep them together
With full stops between the letters.
Water drunk by lips from a red bottle
Moistens F.S.I. fears of bought flats,
A cooled stomach is little for tattle,
The bottle is down with a neck hole
The semi-circular hole for a sipping
Like a semicircular moon in balcony
With a night wind quietly humming.
The night watchmans whistle bores
A semi-circular hole in the midnight.
Now is pressure on top of a prostate
Falling for a leak, like expected cloud
In monsoon any time coming but not,
Satirical about a swollen strawberry
Lightly woken from sleep for poetry
A he he is about old mans love life
Come to ceasura, a vigorous thump
Administered yields no love results ,
Punctuation gone through a window.
Poetry is still left in a nights layers
13
When peeled like tearful onion rings
Nothing at the core,only an absence,
A silence between the layers of dust.
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14
Lake
The lake was different by rusty sluice gates
And shore trees steadfast and light waving
And we sat on the parapet with hair flying
And a photograph made the day with lake
In a frame of time in space, in the married
Space of a son and dreams of his new wife.
It has now pushed far behind ,a tiny sachet
That glistened in afternoon sun like plastic
A ribbon of waters rippled by gentle breeze
Mildly perfumed by an incoming monsoon.
And the monsoon would seem so far away
Tantalisingly out of grasp for a citys thirst
In the lakes dwindling bowl turned brown
With its earth bed crackling,fish long gone.
(The Hussainsagar lake in Hyderabad)
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15
sleep
there was nothing of the sleep
about him, during snack eating
and small talk in the reception
not even a faint hint suggesting
a windowed existence for wife
framed by ma-in-laws waiting
girl , girl, you have some stars
to be pointed to on a black roof
the ones that shine regardless
of who points them to whom
but nevertheless a dad points
them to wide-eyed daughters,
a point to note for starry nights
stars say nothing except shine.
think nothing of them on a roof
except as contrapuntal realities
struggling to accentuate sleep
that is a short term in medium
but a longer term for oblivion
with reference to pointed stars
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: sleep
16
Birds eye views
An august wind is rocked
To its sleep by a sea wave
Around green rock cradles.
In June the rain brings it
From the hills of the sea.
The sea has hills distorted
A matter of wind in a blur
The trees birds eye view.
The pipal tree mimics sea
In dealing with a sea wind,
The way it passes in its hair
So unlike in a standing rice
Stalks bending in humility.
Pipal sings sheeted music
Reading from lowered eyes
When a whole world sleeps
Its birds eye views haywire.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: bird's eye views,
wind
17
The painted sun
In a saffron sky the painted sun
Shines gaily behind a green tree
With orange glow on everybody,
Everybodys leaving but the sun
A fixture that cannot be helped
Like the sunflowers on highway
Frozen before growing into seed
Helplessly nodding head to wind.
Like its flowers a sun nods head
Helplessly to everybodys going.
Neither poet nor painter nor sun
Has a choice in scheme of things.
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18
Fathers day
Let me imagine his flames that
May be spreading their tongues
Where he had turned a flame,
A heat I had felt on moms arm
At times wet with electric grief.
Mom is now flame and her arm.
Some day I burn my own flame.
Together we have fathers day.
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19
Phone noise
Muffled into the purest talk
Phone protesteth too much
When a certain tiny creature
From the vast other shores
Cometh denying my service
And generally laughing loud.
It is such fun to bar all calls.
Virus friend pulls fine legs
Disturbing sanity in pocket
My inward messages are now
A vast silence of the dead sea.
My postpaid is your prepaid
A stick on my abdomen,you sir.
Sayeth the serendipitous virus
We are all in a survival game.
I now restore cellular sanity
Now that you have come of this
Hair tearing in flying colors.
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20
Out of doors
The women are now out of doors.
Not that their bodies are happy
In the cool air of vast wide spaces
Or the wind blew in their faces
Gently lifting their temple locks.
In such times of their months
Women are seldom inquisitive,
Knitting their brows with yes?
Nor are needlessly sentimental.
Do not ask too many questions.
They get annoyed by hanging.
Come to think of it, they are not
Outdoorsy type, loving the trees
The mountain streams included,
Surely not sitting astride horses
Out in windy spaces of country
Nor waking from rain puddles
With mornings croaking frogs.
Do not ask too many questions
They are hardly the curious type
Their bodies are out of bounds ,
Out of bounds for your knowing.
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21
Body still
After the footage ,after the cries
It is now still under the boulders
A flowing river,with sleep-heavy
Bodies in embrace with the river
In the darkness of inner spaces.
On the shore are different cries
About furious searches for bodies
As time slips between its spaces
As if stillness is dead for all time.
But stillness shall live and soon
The river shall be still as usual
And the bodies sleep will be still,
As all the sand has slipped away.
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22
Wet blanket
You watch your pessimism rise
But exterior act is to feel good
On top of a wet blanket below
But leave it at that,not a thing,
A midnights poem at the most.
Spend it freely,it is not money
Peeling away from epidermis.
Ebullience is boiling over a top,
The poem rising like prose act
A spreading thin of semantics
Or a thesaurus caught linking.
But we do not waste a stanza
And keep metaphors for later.
Let the thing dry ,the wet thing.
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23
Short stories
Wonder why stories are to be short
And not ones spilling beyond pages
Their narratives aimed at essences,
Fragrances blowing on short shrift.
But fragments are pieces of lifetime
Like this one triggered by the poet
Who made fragments his business,
A canvas bag on a boy rag-pickers
Scrounging shoulders, stooping low
To pick up value from the useless.
Each is a short story contradicting
The other broken pieces in the bag
And together they make no sense,
Only the acts of bending to pick up.
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24
The lock-keepers privilege
The lock-keeper is privileged to have
A first glimpse of sun born and dying ,
Through a square window of a cabin
And read newspapers spread on lap,
In iron chair, listen to radio mirchi
Alone , with the egrets for company.
Little did he know he held the keys
To existences of a bus load of youth
Who would be swept away as flotsam
On the flip of his switch, in a burst
Of water ,he to bear the cross for it.
Nobody gets to keep his privileges .
(At least 24 students from an
engineering college in Hyderabad were feared
drowned in the river Beas near Thalot village in
Himachal Pradeshs Mandi district after large
quantity of water was released from Larji
reservoir on Sunday)
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privilege
25
Train journey
In the dead of night, we woke
From below our vaulting skies,
Changed into rows of corpses
In checked blankets waiting
For glaciation to set on them.
Below lay one covered corpse
That made all sleeping noises
Of an already interred ghost.
Mortuary assistant is passing
Between rows of his charges.
One body, fresh from its sleep
Asks him to keep temperature
Steady 24 Celsius , calibrated.
Bodies feel better at that level.
Tell when my station comes.
Body goes back to cold sleep.
My own sky is two feet above,
Discouraging telescopic views,
A severely limited spatial frame
In a parody of coffin existence
And later,below the earth mud.
Bodies are all going some place.
At six my station should come.
I decide to get into my shroud
And turn a frozen corpse again.
26
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27
Each body
The late poet said each body
Had its own unique identity.
This one has own , the way
It crouches,in the darkness
Under the stairs or in the lift
Its breath in forgetful liquor,
The way it extends its palms
Wide and enhancing,its way
Of universalizing its sorrows.
The poets body has identity
The way it crouches in lift or
Under stairs, eyes alighting
Behind pillars, its words just
Echoes lost to stair corners,
The way it extends its palms
Wide and enhancing,fingers
Forfeiting their pointedness
Some time on way to a roof
Where lies all its astral stuff.
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28
Just one years rain
Old mans teeth admit wind
As wind blows through them
Like in that mountain pass
Where the rain first appears.
Umbrella is out for mending
By a cobbler at street corner
Who charges too much for it.
Is there anybody cheaper?
Old man is ready to pay just
For one years rain and wind.
Who knows ,he may not be
Around for next years rain.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: one year's rain
29
Remains
In the holy river and its boat
What remains is what I hold
In my minds dusty corners,
Holding an earth pot in hands
With bones whence I sprang,
Bones holding original bones
Their flesh flowing to the sea.
Beautiful remains is the mind
In a head round like the pot
Now shaven, shorn of origin,
Untethered whence it sprang,
Origin obliterated from earth.
Remains shall stay beautiful
Of somewhat obscure origin
Flowing with poets of words
And their beautiful remains.
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30
City sky
Cities are invisible from inside.
When outside,the citys bodies
Wander vaguely in other cities
On footpaths that do not sleep
The sleep is dust,near tea kiosks.
No matter where bodies wander
Minds are always in their cities,
Whose sky follows them behind.
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31
In a manner of speaking
The train ploughs through the night,
In a manner of speaking, as sleeper
Ploughs through a sleep in the train
Everything is a manner of speaking
(Sleeper may be my wife in the train
But that is not manner of speaking)
Poem words are best allowed to fly off
From the rails where the trains wheel
Ploughs the night to let off its sparks,
(Like the knife sharpener in the street
As his foot ploughs through machine),
In manner of speaking, riding a night
When sparks of silence fly off a sleep
While the train is ploughing the night
Words are sparks flying off my night
Like from knife sharpeners machine,
Sparks that do not light lonely nights
But just another manner of speaking.
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speaking
32
Private rain
Rain at night is a private thing
Since sleep does not go public.
There is no secret between us
However,when it probes deep
In eyelids and dreams below.
Rain sleeps in dreams diffused
For want of electricity in wires.
Wires are emptied of electricity
Due to rain itself , rains worms,
Travelling on private rain tracks
In royal finery, pearls and all.
Only sun makes private pearls
But street lights do it at night.
Our budoir has fine rain things
Eclectic in sky,pretty fireworks
Naked birds shivering in trees.
We have it for our private use,
Trespassers highly prosecuted.
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33
Last rains frogs
There in the cellar a man shouts at another ,
Excess of a voice over the mans listening.
A soft brown dog is tugging at mans leash.
Dog shouts from tautness ,from dogs flesh
In excess over the mans control, his flesh
In the elbow, his brain tissues over bone.
I try to make my shouts heard in obverse
Excess of bog over frogs, croaked last rain
They all come back from last years croaks.
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year's frogs