Stories

Stories repeated through generations,
each handing on to the next, some truth,
all gathered in memory of mind and cell;
bequeathing the old to new youth.

Time sifted through those many tales,
tinkering with plot and characters,
reworking ancient facts as mythology;
released in each birth as factors.

And now, repeating, as I do such accounts,
there is a sense of entering into that past,
embarking on a journey of remembering;
handing on each story as they have asked.

NB: not sure I have this right but tried all the same.

II.

In that instant of a drowning madeleine,
transported through the seas of memory
and feeling,  he was adrift on oceans of
smell and taste, sweet, aromatic, sensory -

I looked up from the book, it was time
for coffee and a madeleine from the freezer.

http://dversepoets.com/2015/06/25/meeting-the-bar-with-time-travel/#comment-97261

Puzzled

Lump it all together,
compact and concise,
pack it into memory;
bitter and the nice.

Nervous is the heart,
anxious is the mind,
jittery the palms;
pain is so confined.

Puzzled is the psyche,
patient is the soul,
questing is the self;
so is grief resolved.

http://www.threewordwednesday.com/




 

Waiting for the rains

In that time of waiting, breath held, captured,

as dust sighs on suffocating, surrendered leaf,

silence sits, sullen, suppurating without breeze;

heat holds court, commands; hours textured.

Days are teased through long, stretched seconds,

where minutes sit like years on wearied minds,
as humidity does plot with searing sun defined;

and birds huddle, in gasps which do not lessen.

Breathing through the steaming soup of season,

desperate for the cooling rains to come once more,

watching for bright sky to breed deep, dark flaws;

some do surely stumble into sudden loss of reason.

Madness in those moments of a world expectant,

dragging through the daylight to soothing darkness,

human, animal, bird, leaf and thirsty earth confess;

so all wait for those first drops of rain as presence.

Monsoon One and Two

Monsoon is bared with bitter teeth,

as windy shrieks torment;

the sinking day is ravaged,

the night is fully rent.

Within the howling arms,

we shudder to the floor;

close mind and eyes to sight

and pray for peaceful dawn.

The shattering of windows

with glass in vicious dance;

the timber splinters wilfully

as homes are torn apart.

In small and shivered huddling,

we know ourselves as borne

on arms of deadly wondering,

as Mother Nature yawns.

The eye is hard upon me,

the mouth spits vicious breath;

cyclone in violent birthing,

creates, destroys and rests.

And in the silent endings,

as whispered words are held,

the living drag back into life

and death rings mournful bells.

The night has fallen into day,

the storm into itself

and life returns to broken calm;

where order creeps in stealth.

NB: I wrote this after experiencing one of the worst cyclone's in Bombay's history during Monsoon season. I was protected by hiding under a bed but many living in flimsy shelters, as countless thousands do, were not so lucky and neither were the fishermen whose bodies washed up on the beach for weeks afterwards.



MONSOON TWO

Rain drums shamanic, insistent, determined, deploying liquidity,

reminding, rewarding, renewing all that it meets in downward fall,

washing, rinsing, removing and sustaining life in all its forms;

as if, the heavens had drunk deep, only to release at season's call.

 

In all that sloughing, sundering, swallowing and liquid surrendering,

so do the angels watch, submissive, ordering the elements to rise,

that cycles of dry and wet may be set in harmonic, prayered emotion;

hope can speak again in drowning words, in certain beat with time.

 

The world does dance to rhythms worked in that which is unseen,

and monsoon cannot be held to any sure, or gauranteed account,

these daily drenchings come in ways both whimsical and flawed;

each atom does rejoice when expectations, reality can mount.



NB: I wrote this last year during Malawi's Wet Season.
P.S. I was inspired with more thoughts reading others on dverse but will not post it here as too much to read as it is.





http://dversepoets.com/2015/06/23/poetics-sinful-monsoon/#comment-97137

Voices

What are we if we do not speak,
if our voices cannot be heard,
offering as they do our own meagre
truth, and perceptions which can

come from no other and which
are all we have to hand to another;
hoping only that we can be heard,
even if the words are not welcome?

I ask only that you defend my right
to speak, and allow yourself to
listen, if just to acknowledge that,
like you, I am also here, learning.

Hole in the world

There is a hole in the world where you once were,

a gap of such dimensions it cannot ever be missed,

and yawns in cavernous gaping, like some shocking

smile, smashed open, holding to eternal edges, where

 

my heart hovers by the threatening boundaries of

the abyss, and my mind huddles to one side, every

now and again, peeping into that darkness, as if in

an unexpected moment, I could see you there again;

 

as if I could find your shape deep inside that chasm,

and then, pull it back into place, haul it from the lair,

where it had been hiding, lost to sight, disappeared

into that bunker of time, that grotto of grief which had

 

claimed it, and broken the world I had known asunder,

wrought that fathomless depth with its wounded mouth,

destined to remain open, silent, mocking, keening in

a voice which echoed through memory, and which spoke

 

always of what once was and might never be again,

now that you were lost on the other side of that hole

in the world I once knew, where only your desire could

see you clamber back through, and close it up again.

 

 

 

 

Nightmare

Hideous horse of darkness which cannot be reined,
or pulled to any reasoned stop or place of peace,
but rides the hours of midnight till all is drained;
so does psyche saddle us with no sure release.

Through worlds of dreams and cruel imagining,
the hooves do thunder on our cobbled fears,
allowing nothing in the realms of sleep fulfilling;
draws us on through minutes as if eternal years.

Horror crouches, holding on to sweating beast,
determined not to fall to crushing depths below,
heart pounding as the demons laugh and feast;
so we stay the distance, fast then cruelly slow.

Only in the moments when horizon can be lit,
and daylight draws the torture to a final end,
are we left abandoned, holding rusted, empty bit;
all illusion ended as consciousness does mend.

http://margoroby.com/2015/06/16/poem-tryouts-nightmares/