Friday Poetry: A Country Where Many Reside

A COUNTRY WHERE MANY RESIDE

The octopus tentacles of tree roots

lie flat upon the leaf-strewn soil,

exuding tiny ink-spots of an ant-army:

crawling, scurrying, cargo-bearing

before disappearing inside

their cool, black holes 

of subterranean palaces.

Watching them reminds me that

a tree just does not exist for itself:

actually, it cannot.

That would be far too self indulgent, a selfish act.

It is a country, after all, where numerous citizens reside

and which they call home.

Friday Poetry: The Birds Whose Music Invisibly Perfumes The Spring Air

THE BIRDS WHOSE MUSIC 

INVISIBLY PERFUMES THE SPRING AIR

I discover today that the birds

whose concerts richly, invisibly perfume

the still, warm spring morning air

are called Indian treepies.

They flit from the kachnar tree

to the neighboring gulmohar,

a kinetic, musical long-tailed blur of tan, white, and brown

from a muddy green universe

to a bright green one.

The jade-sheened glossy black humming bird no longer sups

from the kachnar orchids,

which became pod earrings when no one was looking -

and the crows have found elsewhere to feast upon

now that the flamboyant, plump blood-red

monstrously beautiful silk cotton flowers are fat green pods

of future flowers, leaves, roots, and branches.

Only the sparrow traverses

the invisible trapeze-rope in the air,

metal grill to metal grill,

its clay water bowl empty and parched

like a summer desert.

Friday Poetry: The Season's First Mogras

 

THE SEASON'S FIRST MOGRAS

The season's first mogras cost twenty rupees:

the boy takes them out of their plastic home,

pouring them into the bowl of my palm.

In the new moon light, they are phosphorescent,

the half-open buds gradually emerging,

like teeth in a baby's shy smile.

They slumber overnight,

luxuriously curled up

in a bowl full of written water.

When I wake up,

they have already made themselves home.

I journal about the poetry of their fragrance,

which seeps into my words,

the texture of my thoughts. 

The next morning,

they are already gone,
their fragrance a distant, bittersweet memory:

crumpled tea-brown white petals

fall apart in my palms,

like a ransacked city,

the ghost of what it once was. 

** I have started writing poetry again after a very long time - and so, every Friday, I will be featuring a poem of mine accompanied by a photograph. Sometimes, the photograph will inspire the birth of a poem or vice versa. Let us see where this journey of poetry will take me. I will look forward to your thoughts about these tentative re-explorations of mine into the world of poetry!**

Jacaranda Journeys

Entwined

First of all, isn't jacaranda such a beautiful sounding name for an undoubtedly beautiful flowering tree? Actually, I have to be a little bit honest: I don't find the individual mauve jacaranda flower as lovely as glimpsing them collectively blooming upon the trees, the bloom-laden branches silhouetted against the clear sky or scattered en masse upon the grass below.

We are fortunate to live in a neighborhood dotted with lots of gardens, consisting of both large, sprawling and cosy, miniature ones; I discovered one such latter garden during a spontaneous afternoon stroll on a moody, cloudy, cool Delhi day. I had seen the jacaranda blooming there from the distance but I didn't realise it was more than one tree that was blooming; it was only when I explored the garden that day that I observed it was a triad of trees in various stages of bloom, one already having considerably leafed. Being the only jacaranda trees in my immediate vicinity, I was thoroughly enchanted to be caught in a quiet drizzle of jacaranda flowers as they joined the sea of flowers splashing the emerald green grass below.

Sea of Purple and Green

Ever since I have discovered that garden, it has become one of my little pleasures to stop by there during my morning walks and sit beneath these trees; it's invariably deserted when I arrive so I have the satisfaction of having the garden to myself, rendering it in my eyes a secret garden. Even if it's just for five minutes, I quietly sit on a flower-speckled stone bench below the jacaranda trees, glimpsing the flowers fluttering here and there in the air before gently coming to rest upon the ground. 

Radiating

I have lately been taking great pleasure in making flower-dot paintings and so while I was sitting below the tree one morning, I scooped up a few jacaranda flowers, deciding to abstract something out of them too. I had called it the 'Journey of the Jacaranda Flowers' on Instagram, the flowers migrating from the tree to my palm to my sketchbook. There is something so calming and indeed, meditative arranging these flowers upon the stark white desert of my sketchbook, making it bloom before inserting the bindis of dots (perhaps, you could say that I am inspired by Bharti Kher's bindi explorations to a certain extent). Once I have painted, photographed, and Instagrammed the painting, I leave it upon my desk and when I return the following day, I find that the flowers have become dessicated yet certainly not diminished in any which way beauties. And so completes the circle of spring.