Purpose, Where Truth Begins, & Winter’s Prayer
Purpose
It is not about the trees and the stars,
and the play of the sun amid our hearts.
Today, it is not about them.
Butterflies and flowers too. They reside
in the realm of limp embellishments.
The notebook cover is an illustration
of random shapes, curves and colors.
Winning to the eye; but it’s only a cover.
What hosts life cannot live it for another.
There are blank pages between the covers.
I have to seek them. And read
deep into each grain of their fibers.
A man painstakingly bound these pages
with a grooved, leathery hand.
Coarse white thread stitches his name nowhere.
Some pages scream for a stroke; for some scribble.
They wish to be defiled. They want a new purpose.
Many are already filled.
They wait patiently to be revealed.
Each page is a prelude to the one coming after.
Quiet Sunday morning – I hear spiders.
Legion of spiders are taking over our apartment.
I write encapsulated by a silvery web.
Each day we walk into the innocence of a guileless page.
Very soon I will be at the market to buy a contraption.
A naïve bamboo-stick
with a benign tuft of soft jute fibers.
There are spiders to be killed.
There is life to go on with.
Where Truth Begins
Listen! Says the air
to the slow turns within, in silent rhythm.
How it all ripens limp and doughy,
churns and swells life
inside out
in a neutral, stoic display of time.
And that is me:
stung by sun, soaked by rain, dried by wind.
Borne by seasons and matter –
of mostly empty spaces.
Nothingness between walls and clockwork.
Listen to the breath.
How it washes in and recedes. Belongs
more to the air than to the living.
Living are many, and mostly dead.
The dead remain awake
for the moon sways
cuffed to a trajectory of ancient hurt,
and returns to throw tidbits of sleep
to feed the dead man’s feast.
I have to make believe
that there are no lies that inhabit me.
Save the precious one,
so fragile like a glass shell
I hold in a neurotic frame
that somewhere there is a place where truth begins.
Winter’s Prayer
Father, winter is here again –
like a mammoth charcoal moth
hovering and hovering, sprinkling minute mote
from wings settling on shivers.
Arid and flaking open my skin.
A faint red streak
speaks from the middle of my parched lips
winter’s prayer in split discomfort.
The dust has been set free from monsoon’s bind,
and withering charms of spring,
long stale and fetid. Hands are full
of another year’s bounty.
How they rise in swirls
through my creaking spine, blowing away
sediments of time. Unfurls my dusty retina.
Bits of earth lodge in mosaic of my heart.
Father, my heart longs to be earthed.
How can I return home to you
with your gift, our burden of love?
I am still your little boy scared of dance dust.
Give me strength that one day
I too can become the seasons. But, for now –
swathe me in a loving cloth
of familiar smells and calm textures.
And plant me in a haven.
To live here. Even in winter; without leaves.
In melancholy ambient with stony sun streams.
Forgetting warmth.
My heart tells me:
Let winter not be so lonely, so removed
that you no longer hear your voice, feel my joy.
That we can no more suffer our company.
So, I trudge through my sleep
with pain knots in my knees and silence in my keep
along your empty streets
strewn with shadows, stones and earthly prayers
Madhu Kailas is the pen name of Kingshuk Basu. He is a native of Kolkata, India and has lived, worked and studied in various places in India and USA. He enjoys poetry, and writes regularly. He is the author of The Birds Fly in Silence and Other Poems, a collection of 57 poems on various themes like identity, death, love, nature, memories and devotion. He has been published in journals like Indian Literature, Dragon Poet Review, The Literary Review.