Wednesday, April 6, 2011

skyward

skyward

I smile away

the familiar pain of love

transient like moonshine

and walk back into my dreams

love’s crest illumined on high seas

lends light

to floating, dancing stars

the melodious rhythm

of moon-washed waves

matches Ganesha’s cosmic dance

I steal a look at the rising winds

in carefree abandon

and say a silent prayer--

“build me a ladder O winds of time

so that rung by rung

I can one day

reach and touch the skies.”

Child Bride

her first smile of freedom

takes shape in the music of

her kaleidoscopic glass bangles—

dream come true

the bangles belong to her

but they are crushed into

a thousand fragments

under the weight of

his naked unleashed passion

on the very first night

she’s stifled in the punjent smell

of loveless desire.

the broken remnants of glass

scatter multiple colours

on the crumpled bedsheet

but mark her innocence

with only red.

like a million arrows shot at once

her shrieks of terror

pierce the uncanny silence

of the dark expanse outside.

cookie-woman

Cookie-woman

alluring manicured roundness

chocolate and raisin studded,

the cookie was once

a shapeless mass,

a function of

the oven’s volcanic fury

of the master baker’s

no-mercy sweeping gestures

woman,born, reborn

and born again

all in one birth

a function of man’s desire

seeking sense in

sometimes-loved

othertimes-ignored gestures

shaped, chiseled,

to suit her master,

is the manicured cookie

relished bite by bite until

dreams defeated,

she is a shapeless mass once more.

hope

hope

time tires

ghosts of darkness

spread their night-rug

over a million blinking stars

the quietly-burning

light-lending candle

in a shimmering thatched hut

does not lose hope

bent under the weight of

aloneness and familiar pain

the frail woman

offers a silent prayer

as she waits for the moment

of everlasting reunion

with her long-gone child

hope steps onto her threshold

once again and promises that

the brightest sun shall shine once more.