Thursday, June 30, 2011

Faith

They push and fight
for a single sight
of the sacred stone
I turn my eyes
and think
 of someone who died
in the hope to unite
them all in his love

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Oblivion




Toothless smile
oblivious
of the still silence
in the room
She will never know
what its like
to lose a mother



Last night

You came last night
dressed in your best suit 

My heart fluttered 
as you smiled
that familiar, disarming smile 

That gold wrapped box 
you held 
glistened
in the light of the moon 
that looked almost
like a halo behind you 
But it was blurred 
by the mist in my eyes 
as you placed 
under my feet
those beautiful ballerina shoes

And I lost myself to the music 
and to you
for what seems like an eternity 

It still smells of you 
all around me 
almost as if 
you were really here last night 
Just you 
and me
No accident 
No wheelchair




Linked to One Shot Wednesday. Happy Birthday to the site!

Monday, June 27, 2011

Banaras

People here name their kids 'Banarasi' and 'Varanasi'. That is how pervasive the spirit of this city is. It seeps into your identity before you know it, like the water of the Ganges filling all those earthen lamps of hopes, prayers and dreams that float on its surface every evening. The city bustles with its very own Banarasi energy that years of bewildered foreign gaze could not refine and change. They wear saffron and chew paan. They wear green and chew paan. They laugh a paan-ful of laughter as they roam the streets of Daalmandi and Chowk like the characters in Premchand's Sevasadan. But that was decades back. Since then, the bicycles and horse carts have been replaced by cars and buses. But the streets are just as narrow, the buildings just as colonial and ancient. But that is Banaras, ever bubbling with noise and energy, never changing.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Love Died

There was a love who died. No, it was not resurrected, not even on Easter. It died a sudden death. True, it was not doing well for a while. But its death was like that of a man dying of common cold. Shocking, mocking, almost comic.




P.S. This is just a random scribble. To me, this story is complete in itself. But if it inspires you take these words and create something more, I will be interested to read. Leave me a comment! :)




P.P.S. I am still on the 'break', and I am enjoying these days of refrain when blogging does not come much in the way of life. I have moved to a bigger, more airy house that overlooks a park, and I love it! Thanks for your love!

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Oblivion

Fling me back in oblivion
where I could paint you
with naked desires,
no eyes on them
Where you would smell
the fragrance on you
and know I have
stroked my brush again
and changed something
tiny, and impossible
for you to find
but never letting you be
the same
I would shroud a shade of you
with purple 
and love you until
I wouldn't remember 
what you really are beneath
Thats when I would start over
bottom up
to reshape, refactor,rearrange, 
my reasons of loving you






Linked to One Stop Poetry. Visit them to read other poetry and also Shay's brilliant opinion on what makes good free verse. 

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Letting Life Happen



It has been a hectic blogging spree for me for the past few days. I have met and made friends with a lot of amazing people in the blogosphere. These are friendships that transcend space and boundaries, because when art speaks to you, it speaks to your soul. It inspires you to create. To live. To slow down. To breathe. 
Art is alive. It is not the artist. It is more than what the artist is. Because it is also what the artist wants to be. The artist is human. Art is her attempt at things more celestial. It is her attempt to dream things that are somewhere above her, in a place more glorious and more beautiful than the world she lives in. An artist lives multiple lives, dies numerous deaths. Art is those lives and deaths that are not her own, but that she experiences every day. It is the dance she was too awkward to dance, the song she could never strike that right note of, the painting she spilled wrong colors on, the dessert with an extra pinch of sugar, the verses that never rhymed. Art is the artist's imperfection. It is what makes her go on. She loves what she creates, but it never satisfies her, because she has a taste. For utter brilliance. She explores and pushes her human limits expecting a new glimmer every time. She is always trying. Never, ever content. Art is her child. She suffers to give birth to it, and she is reborn when it is born. She protects it from mediocrity, and nurtures it in details. She knows it is not perfect, but she loves it none the less. Art is the mark of her affair with life. A passionate, ignited affair, the flames of which burn her soul and keep her thirsty all the time.

I am going to take a break. And allow an inspiration to engulf me, till I write my next post. I am going to lay back for a while and allow that inspiration to happen.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Style!


I returned from work this evening and logged on to blogger as a routine, to see this sweet surprise waiting for me. It was a moment of elation, of that peculiar squeaky feeling you feel when something amazing happens while you're least expecting it. Thank you Anne for the lovely surprise. I must confess I was a little amazed to be called 'stylish'. Apart from my avatar picture where I'm posing with a stupid hat(that I did not even buy) in a shop, I did not think anything on my blog was really 'stylish'. Again, thanks to Anne, for thinking otherwise.

Style, is not just in glitter and glamour, its also there in works of art that are understated, but that still shine, due to brilliance of content. So, I will pass this award on to


  • The West Wind, whose creativity I truly enjoy and admire, and to
  • Helen, whose paintings, made with deft and detail, speak to me without words

The award requires me to write seven things about myself. I usually don't speak much about myself here, so I guess its time :)


  1. I am a Software Engineer. I enjoy science as much as I enjoy art.
  2. I do not consider myself a good writer. I used to, once. I wrote my first poem when I was 6 years old; since then, there were always a few people who liked what I wrote. So, I kept believing that I wrote well until the day internet (and blogging) happened to me. That was when I saw how ordinary people similar to me, people who write casually, have the power to move you, touch you and turn your world upside down with their writing. I knew I had a lot to learn. I am still learning.
  3. I am blessed with a healthy and short memory. If I decide to move past something, I eventually do. Although I often feel nostalgic thinking about good times in the past. May be I should say, I have a 'selective' memory. :)
  4. I love F.R.I.E.N.D.S. I have watched re-runs of it over and over and it still has me in splits whenever I watch it. In general, I laugh a lot. Possibly a little too much :)
  5. I dream a lot. I wish to see and experience as much as I can. I dream of making a difference to at least a few lives by the time I close my eyes on my own.
  6. I am currently evolving to be more aware, and 'world-wise', as you call it. I am a year and a half into my first job, and I think life takes a 180 degrees turn when you start to earn your own living. You are suddenly not just an observer and receiver, but a do-er and giver.
  7. I have never been called 'stylish', except may be when,as a child, I would pretend to shape my eyebrows by touching the tweezers on them, and my mother would exclaim how stylish I was going to grow up to be. But I grew up to be someone too lazy to care much about looks, as long as what I wore was comfortable. But does it really matter, as long as you have style in what you say and do? :)

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Gathering Dust

Picture by Rob Hanson

Its been a year
since the end of anticipation

since the last of the million times
she picked the receiver
to check if the line still worked
and placed it back
with shaking wrinkled hands

He had said he would call
to tell her how high 
the jet had flown
How inviting the sky seemed
even at war
'Although there are
no borders in sky'
She had observed and sighed
He was thrilled beyond words
Too thrilled to hear the prayers
she muttered 
beneath her shaky breath

Then one day, the phone rang
and severed the last thread of hope
in her tiny fretting heart

Yes, the battle is won,
but he was her only son
The phone, his victory, her life
since that day, gather dust.

The picture that inspired this poem is taken by Rob Hanson, who is interviewed today at One Stop Poetry, and lends his picture for the Picture Prompt Challenge. If you are inspired by his picture, or if you would like to read other entries inspired by it, visit One Stop Poetry. 

Could Have Been



She walked the aisle
and looked at him
as he sat there misty eyed 
If only he had loved her
just enough to try
and not so much 
to put her on a pedestal so high


This 160 characters poem is posted for the Sunday 160 challenge over at Monkey Man's.

Monday, June 06, 2011

Old Woman In The Moon



As a child, I was very choosy about food. It was a pain to feed me. The only possible way to make me eat my meal was to distract me with stories. My mother was a wonderful narrator, and she had a rich stock of stories to tell me. My father, however, would have a hard time as I would ask questions when the stories did not make sense, and I could tell when he was making them up.
Once, when I had a stomach infection, I woke up in the middle of the night due to pain. My mother went to the kitchen to cook the only thing that I would agree to eat those days, and my father picked me up and took me out on the verandah. I must have been four years old then. My father wiped the tears off my face and showed me the moon and the pattern of an old woman in it. The memory of that night still transports me to that verandah with the cool summer breeze drying my tears, the sound of utensils clattering in the kitchen as my mother prepared my food, the moonlight washing the street outside, the comfort of my father's lap, the peacefulness of midnight with the knowledge that the world is asleep, and the pattern of a kind old woman watching over us from the moon.

Somewhere, something inside me had captured the beauty of it all, for me to cherish years later, on a similar summer night.

Friday, June 03, 2011

Faking It

I understood that not a lot of people got the perspective behind this poem. Of course, its art, and open to interpretation, but I would not want you to miss the message. The poem is written from the perspective of someone who is deep in the abyss of prostitution and has lost all hope of coming out of it. Hopefully, this knowledge will add more meaning to the poem as you read it.




I twirl a toe,
let out a sigh
Its practised
and perfected in a classroom
I was forced to enter

I am the clatter you hear
on glass bangles, slowly breaking
I heard the same clatter
in the shatter of my hopes
long ago

I am a lesser human
I pray to a lesser God, perhaps
who is as polymorphous
as the dark street I live in
that turns bright red at night
My God too, changes faces
comfortably
Perhaps she too is accustomed
to the only rule of my trade
'Faking it'

I loved music once
I'm deaf to it now
It helps to be deaf,
and blind,
and numb,
and to fake it.


P.S. Thanks to Daily Love for featuring one of my stories today. :)


Linked to Poets United. Visit them and read a lot of inspiring poems. Savour art! :)

Thursday, June 02, 2011

Its a Warm Winter Afternoon



I ran away from your thoughts
all night
and sat down on the bench
in the park by the lake side
where I had seen you
that first time.

Here, you permeate me,
like the winter sun
that shines all afternoon
and brings the most dreamy naps

I allow your dreams
and this time,
they glisten and shine
as the children play
and the churchbells chime

The world spills over
on my search for you
and I seek you out
in a lonely stroller
who walks about
and stops to admire
the fallen, golden leaves
that crunch into my heart
as the wind blows
the hair off your eyes
I peep into them
Deep and blue
and I open my eyes
again, without you

Its a warm winter afternoon
and you have come around
in my poetry.
Again.

Thanks to Poets United for the above picture prompt. Park benches can inspire such varying lines of thoughts.   So much happens on a park bench! Love, heartbreak, the frolic of childhood, the agonies of adulthood, the imaginations of a poet, the laments of loss, the mundane gossip of everyday life, the lonely memories of old age! This beautiful picture is taken by Ella Wilson.

You might also like: A Vague Dream