Words in Flight
These words are roving
birds, returning
After a spell of wintering
In distant climes
Turning, banking,
Eyes trained
On the last home stretch
Wings weighted with desire
For a tree, familiar
Feet poised to perch
On tremulous twigs
Seeking the solace of roosts
sundered by memory
A Poem’s Birth
I did not womb you for nine months
But each endless stretch of seconds
Between the blink of your embryo
and the beauty of your birth felt long
Or longer even, than gestation
Each ticking thought-beat, an aeon;
Even now, I see your conception still
Soft sudden moments when the muse entered me
And seeded you
Then it was that I, suddenly pregnant
Became priestess: marrying word to word
You were nebulous then, a skinny sketch of an idea
Fickle fetus in the forests of my mind
But I knew you then, poem, I knew you
In the days of your tremulous arrivals
I gloated, caught up in the mystery of your coming
I fed you fat on rhythmic alliterates and dressed you in verse
Yours was a difficult labor, child
But disdaining birth pangs, reached for you
Pitched into paroxysms of painful pleasure
I emerged both midwife and mother
Tangled by your umbilical cord
Exulting as the blood of your afterbirth soaked my quill
And overflowed, drop by eloquent drop
To drench these pages
With the reality of your existence
Dancing with Shadows
We do not dance alone
Our feet move to the music of memories
Fragments of here and there
And this and that
Whirl through us in sync
Some sieve time gently, placidly innocent
Like echoes of a child’s giggle at the fair
Or the murmur of waves lapping me and beach sand simultaneously
Others are virulent claws
Like nails on zinc
Ripping us back to terrible timescapes
Moments when we stood of the edge
Tottering on a 50/50 chance
Of having been or still becoming
When time’s needle flickered from stay to go
We are all returnees
Carrying these ebbs and high tides
As wreaths to the present
Bulky pendants, they ring our necks with ghosts
Of the almost not that still became
We do not dance alone
Our music arrives filtered
fair giggles, beach sand and the rumble of lost ledges
Shadow our dancing shoes
Daylight Saving Time
Trudging home in the juvenile dusk
Trapped in the tangled threads of time turned backward
The glare of streetlamps sting
my eyes. It is night when it should still
have been daylight. I blink and squint
to no avail. Nothing can lift the pall that has settled
Suddenly over the sky
Like a blanket sprawled
Over an unsuspecting face
This must be how an albino feels
In the sudden embrace of blight lights
Only now, it is the dark
It suffocates me with its brightness
The red glare car taillights
Crawling up the street
Seem like evil eyes mocking me
Like the clock that now lies
And the day that dies before its time
Buried by the artifice
Of a manufactured night
Mango Venom
Trust not the sugared promise
Of the market woman’s mangoes
Their hue is fair; primly they perch on the tray
But when you see the flash of fruity flavors
Draped alluringly in mellow yellow
Know: their winks hoodwink the unwary
They have gone to a place where no fruit should go
Plucked an angry green,
ferried by their owner’s greed
These shades of red that glint their skin
Are no virgin tree-dyed tints
But the result of the lusty ardour
Of the hothouse
Full of sugared venom, they are, these mangoes
Waiting to sting the hubris
Of ignorant tongues
Moon Quests
Dear Gentle goddess of the heights
Where were you the other night?
By now you must know…
That in quest of your glow
Eager eyes scanned the skies
We plead, Madam, forgive our hubris
And do not misinterpret our anxious inquires
For we live in a place
Where things that delay
May never, ever re-appear
Like constant electricity and pensions and cheaper prices
Hence, we hope you’ll then see
How your seeming delay
Drowned us in despair
And a dark, dark fear
That the robbers that roam our atmosphere
Had somehow climbed upward
And stolen you away
Ah, kind luminary
Tis true many sins mar these climes
High iniquities that would hurt your sight
Blacker than the gloom which
You seek to dispel with your light
But please
Mild mistress, Henceforth, suspend us not in suspense
But always beam your timely light
To hearts both pious and upright
Lest our hungers may age to anger or fights
Let your certain cycles
Bathe us with consoling constancy
That our hopes may ride on your radiance As you shine the promise of future feasts
