The temple in the jungle

Just when the temple bell rang
In the silence of the jungle amidst
Scattered temple pieces in the trees
There they stood beaming in faces
Tall and naked ,their splendor
Not diminished by time's weight
Their stones do not saints make
But their unfading smiles do
We stand with our hands folded
Shrunk in our fully clothed bodies -
We who came looking for our sun
Find our sun will not set today
And our glass eye cannot capture him.

(The Jain temple in the Samasgarh jungles visited by us for photographing the sunset)

Houses

All the while we want houses

That protect us from fierce tigers

From demons and midnight spirits

Drunk on smelly country liquor

Fed through special stone holes.

We make our gods feel spirited

And bribed enough to give houses

To us and they do not knock

At our midnight doors and scare

Our hair erect on our bodies.

Houses cost filthy money which

Our spirit friends alone can get us

In their unguarded moments

When we flatter and coax them

In chaste Sanskrit incantations

Via fat priests wearing ocher robes.

We love three bed room houses

With gleaming Chinese crockery

And objects d’art in drawing rooms

Of cement and concrete perfection.

Our hearts truly jump up and down

In the midst of much brick and mortar

When they enclose our inner follies

And our absurdly comic enactments .

Copies

Poetry is hard to come by
For want of uninterrupted views
From inside my brain.
Words jingle but not the views.
At the window I see a tiny strip
Of the winter sky
And some passing shadows
Woman carries headload
Of red shiny bricks .
Not just one but three.
Not the bricks but the women
In white polyester sarees
A colourful copy I am in a hurry
To classify and file “save as”
I am in too much of a hurry
To make a play about it
With tall earthly creatures
As dramatis personae
It sounds a bit foolish
To enlarge mere copies
For they only depixellate
The sky is lost irretrievably
And the trees lose greenness.
All the while I need their largeness
Their solidity and their greenness.
But the copies !

Irony

True ,one does not break foot always
On two-wheeler scooter on a windy night
When one returns from buying
Fresh vegetables on a slippery road
When machine stops and men slip
Near the all night petrol pump.
Here grease bubbles have rainbows .
Beauty is not just that but macabre humor
Here laughing does not cause beauty
But writes pain in time-ravaged faces
Surely irony is exquisite but strikes one
As though it were last year’s lightning
That struck the flourishing palm tree
Leaving it friendless and frondless.

Our past went into numbered lockers

you then went into brown sculpture beauty
when the sun-shades played fun with art
You promptly returned with priest-chants
between two deaths there is a years space
her father entering time and your mother.
her ashes box snugly in a numbered locker
his met watery diffusion in distant river
our future deepened our past presently
and the past our parents were went into
numbered lockers and fast flowing rivers

We all hurt each other

We all hurt each other and ourselves
When tears stream down smoothly
Our helplessness breaks mask
Our images stream down like tears
Holding reflections of broken thoughts.
We are trying to break silence.

words

Words hit you like swarming flies
On a sticky summer afternoon
Words fester under your skin
Like wounds refusing to be healed
They enter your eyes like dust
Filling them with hot salty tears
You gather them like sea-shells
To empty the pocket and throw away
The moment you reach home
Words grate like steel furniture
Being dragged on a dusty floor
Words fill your tummy with nausea
Like the guts of a dog run over
By a passing truck on the highway
Words turn into a handful of dust.