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“Seek on high bare trails sky-reflecting violets… Mountain-top jewels” ― Bashō Matsuo

Tag: account

A Lamentation Of Elephants

June 12, 2020June 12, 2020 NickLeave a comment

I kissed your forehead, as old
And expansive as this country
Pre-liberation, and when it shed
Colonialists from the years
Ahead, that grey-blue slate,
Sister to the speared whale
And great roof tiles protecting
Worlds from such a
Vertiginous height
No man could patch the cracks
Though try he might.
You wheezed one last aching breath,
Traversing the aged trunk as I
Soothed and stroked your dieing
Thoughts of fruit and love,
Your empty lungs, your unborn
Calf encased the same potential
Hopes for bitter gourds and mangos,
Some cooling mud;
Gestational travels for ten months
In your womb as you both moved
In time and tune
To demigods, Ganesh’s son;
I too closed my eyes
And wished that your death
Would not be in vain,
Though nothing ever is the same
And days seem more indulged
With rain hewn from monsoons
Than absent sun. A mahout
Beat his chest in mournful ways
And pasted lychees on his flesh
Before throwing himself
Beneath a Kerala Express,
Not far from holy-watered beaches
Where teachers in
Their saris dressed,
(Brighter than Orion’s belt
Adorned with cattle bells
And turtle shells) did explain
(With patience of maternity
Nurses weaning goddesses)
Creation’s rationale
And unwinding purpose
For nectar that heals
And surf that complains
To anyone who listens
On life’s vast edge.
The villagers petitioned
Those self-same teachers
To beseech the inspector
To petition the elders to
Write without a moment’s delay
To the municipal commissioner
Representing in his functions
One of the fifty-seven Ministries
With their objections, and yet
Also make sure to send a gift
They said, with a basket of curds
And the holy unction.

The Minister’s representative
On this abundant state
Had less teeth, less influence
Where you collapsed,
Mid-confluence,
With massive internal injuries
From a digested firework,
Than the endangered volvating
Pangolin found in upper forests.
It’s a matter of nuanced debate,
He said as he combed his
Grey moustache, having read
Through these entreaties
To his committee,
As to who began disseminating
This harmful practice which has now
Killed twelve elephants in
The previous five years, was it
The Marxists or the Farmers, or
The Marxist-Farmers housing
Separatists trained on strangely
Shaped islands to hide explosives
In cars on summer-dappled Sundays,
As people walked to temples
For morning prayers and instead were Immersed in carnage,
Or shopping malls,
Or in this case, in pineapples
And strategically placed bananas.

They used to say, the Sages lost
In Time’s long echo trailing,
That you had a stomach
In your mouth
And memories like tree rings
In your tusks. It’s the
Dendrochronologist’s lot
To arrive at far-flung canopies
Developers forgot, only to find
Every tree succumbed to rot,
Stripped bare, and silent.

An autopsy, the officer said,
Is not required when you can see
The remnants of the incendiary
Device beside the calf deluged
By the nineteen hours of chewed
Digested food, sugarcanes,
Tree barks and rice plants which
Grow as tall as a man in Spring.

So as soon as the crowds subsided
The herd emerged from the glades
By the river, and with their trunks
They held umbrellas of love,
Remebering the scent in your
Lotus smiles and deep dreams
In fields of ambarella, where now
You will nuzzle your newborn calf,
And wait for better weather.

Posted in PoemsTagged account, creative writing, death, dreams, elephants, fruit, humanity, journeys, nature, poetry, society, travel, writing

The Whispering Pines

May 27, 2020May 27, 2020 NickLeave a comment

In the whispering pines
Her husband looked just like
Her child, in his eyes;
There’s yellow tape
At the end of a gravel track
Where they cannot walk
Back to his car, but a dog
Discovered a steering wheel
In the whispering pines.

In the whispering pines
She held the photograph
Up to the light, returned
To its rightful place in her
Dungarees’ front pocket.
She closed her eyes
And remembered walks
On a beach in South Carolina
In the whispering pines.

In the whispering pines
Her husband fell off
The eyes of the earth.
The soil rises slightly
Above a shallow plot
But the gravedigger
Had already flown
To Arizona, as they do,
In the whispering pines.

In the whispering pines
It’s so far from the ocean
The shells do not work.
Never trust a property
With woodland and a conex box
Or a man with a complex
As wide as a god, for there
Are numbered yellow markers
In the whispering pines.

In the whispering pines
Life and loss is a template
To be conformed to,
And we all do sometimes,
In our own ways, lover,
Worker, friend, earlier
Versions of what we want to be.
But the shape went wrong there
In the whispering pines.

Posted in PoemsTagged 2016, account, creative writing, death, loss, murders, narrative, pines, poetry, sadness, trees, USA, woods, writing

Haiku #381

April 24, 2020April 24, 2020 NickLeave a comment

381.

Neighbour cleaning cars,
His trunks have hidden seven;
From my desk observed.

Posted in HaikuTagged account, allegory, April, community, creative writing, poetry, society, spring, writing

El Salto De Altura

March 31, 2020March 31, 2020 NickLeave a comment

If there is to be no more normal
Then I for one am glad,
When reporters refer to a body count
As records from an Olympiad.

Normal was overrated,
Kept me pacified and doled;
I would find a new future unplacated,
Blazing brightly, urgent and bold,

Which unites the common purpose,
A worldwide convention with soul and mind,
Which unbottles potential from the normal,
And greater rewards there we will find

Than the politico and press combined
With chancellors and professors
Could not imagine in their time,
And we halt the hidden transgressors.

 

 

Posted in PoemsTagged account, community, creative writing, Europe, existential, global, journalism, pandemic, poetry, purpose, society, togetherness, vision, writing

Report Of A Carjacking

March 28, 2020 NickLeave a comment

Unaware of myself through all those years
Kowtowed to someone insincere
Redoubled in forms more haunting.
In the seed of a sunless shallow dream,
My daughter abducted further upstream,
Echoes of carjackers’ jackal-like taunting.

With a super-subliminal ego attack
I tried to pull their vehicle back,
Against the seams of horsepower hock.
By the skin of my soul I was suddenly free
For my body’s hull had stowed a key
And my life outside is the lock.

I have survived the slander and slumber;
In my hand I found the blackmailer’s number,
I was not perturbed by her call and her knock.
The thieves were gone before their time
While I will return long after mine,
To open the doors before I dock.

Posted in PoemsTagged account, creative writing, daughter, dreams, incident, poetry, sleep, subconsciousness, writing

Rabbit Black Hole

March 25, 2020March 25, 2020 NickLeave a comment

Jack Russell Terrier tracking down
A rabbit black hole belly found,
Scent of bobtail buried hound,
Within a warren’s mapless town.

Suddenly trapped, and no way back,
For a month in a forest left for dead;
No walks in the park, no sharing the bed,
Your mother drank a heart attack.

I’ve been cleaning again, and you can tell,
It’s an ocean of bleach, a rusty nail,
Just within reach, you cannot fail,
It is odourless in a lagomorph hell.

Posted in PoemsTagged account, creative writing, death, dogs, forest, memory, poetry, rabbits, reflection, writing

Mastodon

February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 NickLeave a comment

The investigators arrived on the scene
At dawn. They could feel
From the steel seams which had
Buckled and warped
The heat of the steam escaping,
And as frost evaporated off
Mangled tracks and sleepers,
The heat reduced the metal there
To sludge of oil and deafened prayer.
They could smell the paraffin and coal
And burnt scarves and children’s toys
Before they had opened the doors
Of their vehicles, federally insured,
Absorbed it before they could seal
Their nostrils using protective masks
With labels which read ‘For one use only’,
And before they could unlock the trunk
Containing dozens of numbered markers
In yellow and black, and other trappings
For their employment, I looked back
To where this journey’s seventh junction
Became a rosary bead, no more than that,
Lost in drizzle and loneliness.

Across the rails, beneath the cliff,
A blackbird was strangely strapped in death
To a scorched pine tree’s torso.
I looked down and thought about
Meredith and all the others who
Had boarded that ornament,
Minding the gap,
A handbag strap,
Tickets clutched as tightly
As pessimists hold on to their mishaps;
And I realised in the dropping minutes
That instead of a vessel, this was a man,
The coal in my body, the tracks in my hands.

Posted in PoemsTagged account, death, dreams, existence, incident, journeys, Poems, poetry, train, writing

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