Poetry by A.J.Rao

Dreams persist

2010-08-31T10:22:00.001-07:00

In the Sunderbans the shadows were long
And diaphanous reaching up to the skies
Outside the huts the trees seemed crooked
And leafless, bearing the burden of sins
Against the child’s shrieks at phantom’s coming.
In the city the nights are dreamt once again,
In broad daylight among several stories;
All the while, in the backwoods, a yellowed day
Was witness to hist’ry being enacted.
Meanwhile there was fever rising in blood
Strangers at midnight attacked us for secrets
A little girl laughed at the dreams in our head,
Outside the room, from the fever of her blood.

The Last Lecture

2010-08-31T10:21:00.000-07:00

In Randy Pausch’s last lecture there is space
Left briefly to be occupied en bloc-
The space that will exist, lacking, always,
In substance like quarry in a hillock.

You imagine the quarry filled with dark space
Stand on the rim of the hole that exists
In presence of time and absence of space
Follow the last lecture to clear its mists.

You don’t get into his circle really
Of an inspiring cancer death suffering
The circle of dark humour surreally
But as a tangent on its outer ring.

Stand on the rim and into the dark lean
Strain your eyes to see own reflection keen.

(Written as an Elizabethan sonnet)

Choices

2010-03-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

It is on a line that I exist all the time.
My hours and days become nights
And dissolve into endless time.
Clearly it was not my choice to exist
Remember, when I came into being
In the viscous amniotic fluid
My body actually started pulsating
Outside of my own free volition.
My birth was a cataclysmic accident
Now that I exist and occupy space
I cannot stop my heart from beating.

Outside, the eagle swirled thrice
In circular motions in the April sky
And settled down on the ledge
Of my nineteenth floor office room .
He looked at me nervously , aware of me.
His shrill eagle-call pierced the sky
As he took off towards the vault of the sky.
He swirled , once again, in circles
And swooped on the lizard in the bush.
Like me, neither of them had choices.

Images

2010-03-20T19:57:00.000-07:00

Disjointed and derelict images

Fuse into my flowing consciousness -

A dimpled beauty is selling hotel space

A nest-builder mother-crow pecks at

Green young mangoes hanging alongside

April's burning morning sun .

Suddenly a kurta-clad grey-haired woman

Bursts upon the conscious with violence ,

Her comforting presence in the airplane

Complementing,by her side,another woman

Who is sleep-walking,on her way,

Her head in her hands,to take charge

Of a mere body which once throbbed

In the deepest recesses of her own body .

Disparate images , wide apart in time ,

Flow into my sleep and then out of it

Sometimes straying into my wakeful self.

Dying of love

2010-03-20T19:41:00.000-07:00

You watch the celluloid horror

Of a twelveyear-old girl

Lying spreadeagled, shrieking

As knowledge strikes as horror

In the suburban train

Of three living-dead humans

Watching a twelveyear-old

Dying of love.

The Wind

2007-05-22T05:16:00.000-07:00

The wind blew in our direction, shadows played

It is the eyes that lacked the answers, in the contrast

At the eye of it all I knew my borders when the sun blazed

The morning sun went quickly, the noon would soon come

There was wind in the hair, my thoughts fell into the skin

When everything happened nothing actually occurred.

Up there the cosmic egg flickered beyond the trees

The blue emitted golden rays in the silky clouds there

As if I could collect all that in my past canvas bags.

Yesterday morning a little bird shrieked on the wire

My garden was full of them and under them, below the wires

Meanwhile the loops continued endlessly in my mind

While the summer season seemed to be undecided

When the monsoon would begin in the salt water and hills

And journey across the mountains and windy coconuts.

My words are silly giggling girls playing in the moon

Together they do not sing but hum like the pipal leaves

When the wind comes from across the the distant hills.

Transience

2006-09-23T04:49:00.000-07:00

At the vaulting dome waves refused to travel
Unless on a few pieces of silver and a name.
The flying metallic bird will take two full hours
These angels in turquoise will feed our appetites.
There is fear lurking in our minds behind bravado.
We try to shut out noises of after-death and failure
We blame ourselves for all our stupid failures
As though they really mattered to us and the dead.
We then read patterns in the greyed whys of decay.
As though the whole thing is a science of death
And we have nearly mastered the art of dying,
Of succumbing to the need to maintain transience.
We smugly wear the polyester film of transience about us
We read poetry in the trivial tragedies of their tatters.

The sea

2006-07-16T20:08:00.000-07:00

You were talking about walking, barefoot,
Into the sea, with orange fires between eyes
She was last seen behind the customs warehouse
Chanting skeptical mantras with a lisp
Lips trembling with fearful doubts
The shadows there gobbled her up
Actually the sea only gobbles up shadows.
As had happened with that man
Who returned bloated at high tide
You see we have never worshipped
These small Goddesses who become angry
There a bald man walked into the sea
The sea of emptiness beyond the window
Wanting to get back to the mother fast
Inside, a greedy woman , a son in fog
At the end of the street they all disappear
Where there is a blind turn, a dead-end.

God’s mountains

2006-07-07T21:55:00.000-07:00

Invisible are their powers, unfelt and secure
The mountains lay there brown and puffing
In the mid-noon sun among yellow-dropped leaves
The scrolls on their walls dated back to eons
Brown-skinned ancestors shrieked, ghosts,
Their smelly wings flapped in cave-silences
Several worn-out paths winded to forgot ruins
There they stopped midway vanishing in bushes
The temple bells were heard under the banyan tree
The tree spread its hair reaching the steep slopes
It was the clouds that brought the brown haze
The sky ended up in blue torpor in penciled hills
There in the wilderness shrieked British ghosts
Collectors who had rested in lonely stone buildings
Pondering deeply on history’s ghosts lying supine
On broken temple foundations with missing walls
There in a stony niche slept God with his eyes closed
A lotus emerged from his navel, mysterious and born
In fact the whole of the world burst out from there.

Images in poetry

2006-06-06T05:18:00.000-07:00

This wordy struggle went on for too long
It is airy words which chased beauty-thoughts
While several filigreed images filtered light
At the back, a flung radio played on the roof
While Bukowski watched the sun shine
On the woman’s behind up in the air,
In the garden, his folded figure on the window.
A little heaving bird on the electric wires
Played high drama in shrill baritone, you see,
A real thing, not an insubstantial phenomenon.
Poetry came and went with wind and rain
Premature and dusty on fragrant creepers
Their flowers became stars on moonless nights.

(Reference here is to the poem “A radio with guts by Charles Bukowski)

The sea

2006-05-15T22:10:00.000-07:00

Thought heralded a boatful of laughter
Checkered, courageous, fishermanly
In spray-powdered, sprinkle-diffused
Froth seething with salt and blue
As though the sea horizon heaved
In musically multi-colored sound
Steeped in dead-dry- fish smell.
A boy walked away from the sea-sun
And idly prancing about crows.
Vasco Da Gama’s stone tablet stood
In history’s powdered rock and sand
And broken -colored boat masts.
At the corner glistened wet sand
In tree shadows falling in sea
Their dark hair hiding red agenda.
These white buildings sat idly
In history’s tiled canopies witnessing
Communism’s capitalist fortunes.
The French windows hid much beauty
In the shadows of mosquito nets
While hot pepper creepers snaked
All the way up the statuesque teaks.
In the slush coconuts proudly stood
Spreading dark hair in the night.
Here, rain happened quickly
Rocking moist coconut fronds
Hiding still, hairless sea-eagles.

(A poem which happened on the Kapady beach in Kerala)

Hail

2006-04-21T22:55:00.000-07:00

this summer is not hot,only the remembrance
the leaves are sometimes dripping with dew
by the road tall thankful trees stand
their dignity enhanced by the shrubs under dust
the city sits lazily in the afternoon
in unfinished perfection, under a coat of fine dust
in the car the poetry book crackles
under heavy ego and self glorification
Sanchi's golden brown stone dust settles
on the beauty-things of the hazy mind
here in the attic of the mysterious mind
the evil man cometh rankling, digging
the black coalmines of despair and darkness
our weapons are only a few mantras
clouded under black coaldust, saying sorry
somebody close to us is dying, surely
the clouds are ominous all the time
laden with bloodlust and bellyache
in the pit of my stomach is vomit-disgust
now the rains are here ,balls of snow
we catch them in our palms ready
only they are slipping through the spaces
we cannot hold our fingers together
and our white- clouded glory fizzles soon.

The dreams persist

2006-03-22T22:05:00.000-08:00

In the Sunderbans* the shadows were long
And diaphanous, reaching up to the grey skies
Outside the huts the trees were crooked
And leafless, bearing the burden of our sins
Against the child’s shrieks at the phantom’s coming.
In the city, the nights are dreamt once again,
In broad daylight, among several theses;
All the while, in the backwoods, a yellowed day
Was witness to cultural history being re-enacted.
Meanwhile, there was fever rising in our blood
Strangers at midnight attacked us for our secrets
A little girl laughed at the dreams in our head,
Outside the room, from the fever of her own blood.

*( literally ,beautiful forests, the estuarine forests of Bengal, the home of the royal Bengal tiger)

Mornings

2006-02-23T04:31:00.000-08:00

My birds are twittering constantly;
Their colors refuse to climb the sky
Amid scattered sounds and sunrays.
My mornings are many-hued skies
Rising from treetops of birdsongs.

Mother and sea

2006-01-26T21:00:00.000-08:00

On the shore, an image of her
Shimmered, in frothy laughter.
The sea has now risen
Like her own body’s upheaval,
Then, in pure, purple pain.
The sea will calm down
When the night is born.

The call never came

2006-01-25T01:31:00.000-08:00

Thinking nights cannot easily sleep
Full of dark secrets in the belly
That rise as smoky-eyed dreams,
When awareness takes an abrupt turn.
The tree stood mute by the temple
A man cogitated on the verandah
Another, on his knees, stared at the river
An old man squatted, his head bent,
Among turbaned men of another time,
Awaiting the call from across the river.
Actually the call has never come
It never comes in dreams and art.

Poems

2006-01-20T01:39:00.000-08:00

Creatures of the gone world walk,
In measured meters, by dark streams
Flowing with the city’s vulgar sins.
Thinking poems are autumn-falling
In criss-cross patches of golden sun,
Actually these are pallid ghosts
Pulled out of unlit eastern skies
Laughing poems feel like poems
On the grassy mounds, children
Mimicking toothless laughter, hiding
Lots of death-fear knotted around
Approaching birthdays in jitters.
Silver manes falling on grey scarves,
They laugh their guts out, ha ha,
In the club of morning laughter
On grassy mounds in sunlit parks.
Yellowed skulls hiding in monkey-hoods
Hardly hear the world’s laughter.

Responsibility

2006-01-18T21:02:00.000-08:00

We have thought deeply;
Our responsibility ends
When we leave this place;
It will be such a relief.
We click our tongues;
We wear our oldness
On our hanging selves.
The symmetry remains
Wholly outside our grasp,
Whatever we do still.
Beams of yellow light
Flood our parks, our eyes.
Those pixels are getting lost,
From our translucent skies
When we lie under the sky
Squiggly worms no longer
Swim behind closed eyelids.

Possession

2006-01-01T21:31:00.000-08:00

The Goddess spoke, fiercely,
Through white anger’s mists;
The body shouted thick-throated
A lower order goddess, surely,
Cannot be all that demanding
Crying for well-fattened cocks.
Fear becomes the key translating
To waves of body movements.
A matter of thinned blood supply
Or a fleeting hardening of vessels,
She lay there sprawled, wailing.
Anger burst out of the bounds
She had crossed all body-barriers
Just when sanity finally returned.
A mere transient ischemic attack
Or a turmeric- yellowed Goddess
Extending dominion over disbelief?

Struggle

2005-12-23T21:03:00.000-08:00

There was fear all over;
Things happened very fast.
The body quickly gave way;
The sanitized walls closed in.
The lone crab struggled
In a puddle of scalding water
There were voices around
All happened in a split-second
When someone shouted
Pull him out, for God’s sake;
This is a mere dream.

Leaves

2005-12-18T23:57:00.000-08:00

Here, the man went inward and wise,
Reluctant teacher, about to enter light
The leaves about him had a faint aura
Not a pall of dust but of wisdom’s light,
The why of all including our nothing-
We who had liquid origins and trauma.
He had an answer to all our questions
But no questions to our lucent answers
His ears were long and unhearing
As were his eyes small and crinkly.
It was not he who patted his tummy
And laughed to the vulgar crowds loud
Just a yellow figurine on dusty shelves.
Did you say he had frozen in bronze
With an enormous stomach side-splitting?
Actually our fears froze behind his ears
I can hear their crunch in these leaves.

Existence

2005-12-18T23:52:00.000-08:00

Here a talking man is sleeping,
His arms akimbo, feet in the air.
Then were wild gesticulations,
Sweat on brow, fire in the eyes
Now vacant and unconnected.
He no longer exists in space
But he had happened in time
Whatever begins shall remain.

A photographer’s quest

2005-12-13T23:49:00.000-08:00

The city lay crumpled in a quiet corner
The evening smelt onion-peels and roast
The sun slid below an unfinished house
The white ghosts had still time to return.
Pulse-beating hearts, thought-abhorrent,
Beat in the very depths of their rib-cages
In onrush of blood and oxygen-seekings.
At the other end of the beauty-spectrum
Several transformations worked technically
In coloured copies of quintessentialities.
A few frames mattered and horizons’ tilts
The artist looked for exactnesses of science
Capillary details appealed to beauty-logic.
You know how we seek ghosts in quiet time.
Our graphic eye sought the nature of things
In white balances and still phosphorescences.
Beauty eluded while pursuing pixel- perfection.

On return to Mumbai

2005-11-25T22:01:00.000-08:00

The city is daylong and sea –backed
The sea-child deeply dangled his feet
Into the sea at the misty radio club
Near the cockroach-ridden sea palace
Bringing back a tide of memories
Years ago, I had bought my identity
Here, in a piece of paper, full of lies
And endless possibilities of hurt
In the fragrant harbour to come .
Now the sea is calm but afraid
I see Rukmini’s lying-in hospital
Along with the juice hair parlours.
Stock- brokers rub rotund stomachs.
Scared dons account for deaths
There ,at the junction , in a sea of cars
Stand these muddy-haired children
They have a nasty habit of poking
Their outstretched grubby hands
Directly into the holes of your eyes.

The sun-photographer

2005-10-26T22:09:00.000-07:00

It is this luminosity, my dear,
Of the gilded leaves in the sun
The magic eye promptly catches
A silver flicker, a yellow transience.
A palliative to the chemical pain
In variously knotted entrails and
The reddish tinge in eye-whites.