On the full moon day

The moon fluttered atop God's flagpole
A thousand oil lamps smelt of God
Scattering birds in the tree's darkness.

Mornings

My birds are twittering constantly;
Their colors refuse to climb the sky
Amid scattered sounds and sunrays.
My mornings are many-hued skies
Rising from treetops of birdsongs.

Corners

Our old tiled house had its corners
Soft and purring like our family kitten
We looked into our abandoned well
To fathom the depth of its corners
The water there was a mere shadow
The shadow of a reality that once was.

Through the key-hole

The key would not turn
I can see through the keyhole
A shadow playing on the wall
The shadow moves towards another
Until they both become one
Playing the same music
Of life and death
Of death-in-life.

The Window

The night queen bloomed beneath the window
And I can smell the morning grass
Beyond the red-and-white saree
That hangs, dripping, on the clothesline
Amid shattered pieces of the summer sky.

The naughty cuckoo

Then , one dark night,when we were fast asleep
The monsoon arrived with fierce wind and gale
Spoiling the children's fun and promises of sweet fruit
We blame this entirely on our cuckoo friend
Who brought in premature rains this season
By persistent and persuasive musical supplications.

My moon fell into the well

My moon had fallen into the well;
My pail could not bring it up
I shall continue to drop stones
Someday the water will rise enough
To bring up my beautiful moon.

The firangipani flowers

The firangipani tree blooms
In my village temple compound
I smell God through a child's memory
Recalled by its fragrant flowers.

Our dear hibiscus tree

In the morning when we shook our hibiscus
Tiny tingling raindrops fell like icicles
On our falling eyelids and outstretched tongues
Yesternight we were afraid of the fierce rain
Our dear hibiscus stood between us and fear .

A shadow man

The winter fire swelled
Pushing shadow man to wall
Thence to the mango tree.

Girls

Girls threw stones in charcoal squares
Their pigtails wavered , ding-dong,
As they jumped over the squares ,one-legged.

Kolkata's kids

Kudos to Kolkata's kids
With lilywhite cheeks
And lightweight stomachs
Scrounging for food crumbs
In its garbage dumps
They keep the city clean
And our conscience clear.

At the Grand Hotel, Kolkata

The morning crystallizes
The moment swells
To an iridescent event
Amid outcry of cutlery
And bone-clatter of china
Sparrow-love on the lawns
And aromatic hotel smells.

Fever

I lie here , on this side,
A miserable ,reluctant host
They enter me, quietly,
And cling to the nuclei of my cells.
Beyond lies opaque space
Neither I nor they have choices
That is the way the script goes.

A blade of grass

There is allaround oblivion felt in my unbeing
Only the other day I was a blade of grass
Today I cannot wave in the mountain breeze
Uprooted from my mother I do not know my being
Just like that hill covered in a haze of forgetfulness.

The song

Metallic music poured forth
From yellow discs in fevered rhythm
As our sepulchral child-egos rose
Our consciousness flapped its wings
We only rise once over the clouds
Our waxen wings melt too quickly
But our memories remain of flying.

Prayer

Our eager hands rise from our hearts
Our feet beat music out of the earth
But these shadows keep playing with us
We produce our living music from death
Our prayer hall is full of holes in the roof
We see fine particles playing in their beams
When it rains droplets from the broken sky
Fall into extended palms disturbing prayers.

Sunrise and flowers

In my nights of waiting
For sunrise and flowers
I look pain in the face.
I wake up bleary-eyed
Trying to catch beach suns
Before they turn white.

Sleep

As the temple bells ring
The earth burns slowly
Going up in swirls of smoke.
These lights hurt him
But the smoke does not.
At the tunnel’s beginning
It is like what it was
When it all began.

The statue of Gomateswara

He interrupted us ,smiling,
In our endless dreams.
The earth came alive
Where his feet touched .
We felt, actually, small as if
We had to remain silent
While the earth came alive.

Be

The flowers spoke nothing
Waiting for indifferent lovers.
Their colours touched the sky.
Their existence was close-ended
Being closely trapped in the sun.
Drinking moon-beams, they want to be

As birds in the higher zones do.

Smoke

Beyond the grey hills
Thick white smoke
Rose in a column .
My glass eyes saw
Veiled habitations
I heard voices rising
In musical supplication
Drum-beats quickened
Existence became smoke.

Breeze

The banyan's shadows played
With yesterday’s leaves
The words were leaves
My shadows played with.

The Return of Beauty

Things remained unsaid
Beauty had cried in torrents
Of words bereft of thought
Till the blazing March sun
Beat history's scraggly stones
A midsummer celebration
Ensued with images galore
Beauty returned from the hills.

Wounds

In the recent monsoon
Our rivers felt as if
The mountains had bled
From fresh wounds
Their flesh has gone,
Across the green seas,
To the distant Chinaman
To fill out his bones.

Dreams

Several flimsy images are played
Behind my heavy-lidded eyes
They are nothing, not even existence
Just fragments of a fractured reality.

Sleep

And today his breath stirred
Under the unkempt beard
Tomorrow under the blue sky
When my car will pass this way
There will be a grey space
Then my eyes will turn away
I shall roll down the panes.

A train journey

Then the world moved away under our feet;
A barebacked child mopped the floor under our seats
A fifty -paise coin glistened in his hungry eyes
Like the broken sun found in the muddy puddle
That had formed in yesterday’s wind and rain.

A dog's death

He had come into us, running,
Yelling, in crescendo of pain
Then all was peremptorily still.
He was chasing steel shadows
Which had no business there.

The sun-photographer

It is this luminosity, my dear,
Of the gilded leaves in the sun
The magic eye promptly catches
A silver flicker, a yellow transience.
A palliative to the chemical pain
In variously knotted entrails and
The reddish tinge in eye-whites.

The tribal woman

Ebony-backed tribal woman burns her mouth
With lighted cigar inside ,flickering
Like a firefly trapped in a rock crevice.

Mother Kali

Mother Kali’s magnificent lidless eyes
Were moist with maternal tears
As Bengal squirmed at her bygone glory
The loss of yesteryears’ literature trophy
Has left its bhadralok bewildered and bereft,entirely.

The rock

The drill cut through the rock
Until there was no rock
Only a bluer sky.

The rock

The rock is being cut
Slowly disintegrating
Real existence, ours.
The drill pierces time.
The sky becomes bluer
With nothing between
The blue sky and us.