Saturday 9 May 2015

Nameless Verse

Passion and its dying embers
Keeping me awake this summer night.

"There are three things that make us sleepless--
  Passion, the lack of passion, and disease.", said he.

Our crossing smiles and shy eyes betrayed
Stories of our pasts that led us here.
He misses her and she misses him--
A reality washed over by their tumbling bodies
On nights when human nature turned awash
Their hearts that once leaped as wild dolphins
On seas they could call their own.

In captivity of those seas that turned stormy,
Those dolphins smiled, yet. 
The throes of their passions undaunted.
And when those seas the dolphins held ever so dear, washed them ashore.
The burning, brittle specks of sand caged their hearts.

The dolphins existed no more than the cities you see from the skies--
Scattered gold dust, a mere illusion,

Their hearts learnt to live in self-made cages.
Their eyes learnt to give curtained glimpses
Of the bay windows they used to be.
He sang to her and she wrote poems.
Trapped in illusions  of their selves
That once roamed free, drawing gasps
Like the red beaked blue magpies fleeting past.

Little did their hearts know of proximity
Born of cages and lost loves.
Theirs was a blossoming question mark,
Etched deeply, swept under the rug determinedly,
Their longing for his face and her face
Marking all their destinations across life.

Little did he know, she felt it.
If only their seas of yesteryears were wiped off,
Their hearts-- the happy dolphins would discover
Oceans they would find in each other.

(This image is from here: https://jessicajanecharleston.wordpress.com/)

Thursday 7 May 2015

Coming Home

Coming home always has multiple meanings
From awkward hugs that remind me
Of too much time passing by.
To the smell of old age wrapping home--
A constant reminder of goodbyes.
Goodbyes that can and will be permanent.
But the heart won't learn to accept.

Coming home to boxes full of sweets
And eyes withering with decades gone by.
Eyes that look at me, with so much love.
It would fill an ocean.
Sadness permeates the books lined so haphazardly
In every nook and cranny of the house.

Too much knowledge and too much love destroy equally.

Coming home to my two fathers
Whose love is more than that of a large, joint family.
Whose care and scoldings mean so much more today
Than all the years when teenage ruled and rebelled.
Conversations that blend mathematics with governance,
Geography with historical tales and books--
The books in this house are family trees of voluminous emotion.

Coming home to hands that shake as they feed me.
So much pride in home-grown mustard greens-- 
Growing accidentally, like the distances between us now.
Expansion-- of silences, of origami boxes and withering pages
Resonate consistently, saying, "come home for good".
I am a little stranger to it all each passing year
Growing fonder of and more distant from their balding, greying heads.

Coming home each year-- a little older.
Growing within myself, growing smaller from them.
My two fathers occasionally chuckle from memories
Of my infanthood and their youth.
Those chuckles turn to sudden sighs of the present
Like dying batteries of a constantly ticking watch.
And we all return to the normalcy of today.