Name: jagannath rao adukuri
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What floated idly in our dreams
Incorporated our liquid selves
Into its fluffy cotton clouds.
We are not we of our dreams
But fleeting fragments of light
That roamed the silent inky night
To join dawn’s phosphorescence.
The sister rocks woke up
To the sun's golden touch
Their sisterly shadows
Lengthened luxuriously
Over night-weary shrubs
As hundreds of other shrubs
Were being set on fire
On the edge of their world.
(Two giant rocks in Hampi stand leaning towards each other at the top , their silhouettes looking like two fond sisters hugging each other . Hence the name “sister rocks “)
My people’s concentrated history
Flowed through these stone archways
Stone people who lived on forever
These are my dearest kinsmen
My flesh and bones are made
Of the same powdered red rock
We worship the same granite god.
(At the Hazar Rama temple in the Hampi ruins)
The luminous red-and-white chalk-lines
On our profoundly furrowed foreheads
Extended, over tenement tops and temple towers,
Into anarchic aggregation of scriptural argument
The truth lay, mainly, not in monistic oneness,
Not even in dualistic separateness
But in the fiery union of the flesh with the spirit.
(The Vaishnavite,a follower of Vishnu,believes that Vishnu is the chief God ,the creator,the preserver and the destroyer while the Shaivaite believes that Shiva is the chief God)
The monk grinned from ear to ear
As the celebration went on endlessly
There was no end , only a beginning
There was a twinkle in lotus-eyes
And a mere flutter of her eyelids.
So many bones , so much dust.
The monk celebrated her transience
Laughing at the ephemeral reality
That began as a mere idea
In the artist’s chaotic mind.
The artist’s power did not matter.
The princess’s love did not matter.
The laughter began the end.
(At the Krishnapuram temple)
She stared at the wooden beam
The wood that was once a tree
A tailless lizard came from
Behind the wooden beam and looked
At her for the seventeenth time
kitta kitta kitta said the lizard
She who had become ‘it’ stared
Unremittingly at the wooden beam
At the beam that was once a tree
The beam looked at the tailless lizard
The continuum flowed endlessly .
There is a gentle rustle
In the coconut frond;
Our hand-fans fail to
Agitate the wind around.
The squirrel runs up the tree
A half-eaten guava
Falls to the ground.
This moment, now,
We don’t understand.
The night will be on us
As if nothing has happened
The crows will retire
As if a gun-shot is heard.
We have seen it all
We have heard it from others.
This is not the first time
We are entirely paralyzed
In our face and mind.
arundhati stirs the leaves within me
like yesternight’s wind in the pipal tree
the leaves are yellow and ripe for falling.
(arundhati subramaniam’s poetry)
Thinking nights cannot easily sleep
Full of dark secrets in the belly
That rise as smoky-eyed dreams,
When awareness takes abrupt turn.
The tree stood mute by the temple
A man cogitated on the verandah
Another, on his knees, stared at the river
An old man squatted, his head bent,
Among turbaned men of another time,
Awaiting the call from across the river.
Actually the call has never come
It never comes in dreams and art.
The rain beat the lake, in rising shrapnel
A girl hid there under the rain shelter
In the eye –shadows of the afraid lover
He that was afraid of the lens’ blinding light
The sun still refused to be coaxed out
Consequently there were no copies of beauty
The rain was now furiously beating the road
All through the evening the wind howled
And there was nothing that we could do
In this sort of rain nothing really happens.
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.
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