Poems

മഴത്തുള്ളി 

ഒരു മഴത്തുള്ളിയായ് മണ്ണില്‍ പതിക്കുവാന്‍
ഒഴുകുവാന്‍ ഒഴുകിപ്പരക്കാന്‍ കൊതിപ്പു ഞാന്‍.
പുല്കൊടിതുംബില്‍ തുഷാരമായ് തീരുവാന്‍
പൂക്കളില്‍ പുഞ്ചിരിപ്പൂവായ് ചിരിക്കുവാന്‍
എത്തവാഴക്കൂമ്പിന്‍ മധുരമായ് പയ്യി -
ന്നകിട്ടില്‍ ചുരക്കുന്ന ക്ഷീരമായൂരുവാന്‍
വേലിപ്പടര്‍പ്പിലെ കാരമുള്ളില്‍ കണ്ണ്
നീരായ് നിരാലംബമെന്നും തുളുംബുവാന്‍
ആയിരം സുപ്രഭാതങ്ങളില്‍ ഗംഗയായ്
കാറ്റിന്റെ ചുണ്ടിലെ ഗായത്രി കേള്‍ക്കുവാന്‍
ഒടുവിലീ മണ്ണിന്റെ നാഭീമുഖങ്ങളില്‍
ഒരു മഹാ പ്രലയക്കുതിപ്പായ് സ്ഖലിക്കുവാന്‍
പിന്നൊരു വേനലിന്‍ സംഗ്രാമത്രിഷ്ണയില്‍
മണ്ണിന്‍ വിയര്‍പ്പായ്‌ പുനര്‍ജനിച്ചീടുവാന്‍.   

Her Love

Her love is like the early rain in June,
Pouring heavily from the cloudy heights,
Then thinning down into a soft whispering drizzle,
And again gushing forth in an unchecked torrent.

Her love is like a mountain gale that topples the tree tops
And crushes the forest in its rising waves of lust;
Then turning into a gentle whistle among the reeds,
And climbing slowly the sacred heights of bliss.

Her love is like a little country girl,
Wide-eyed and wrapped in deep colours,
Weaving strange patterns on a green piece of cloth:
A thousand blossoms blooming on her needle’s tip.

Her love is like the snow flakes
That fell over me one Christmas night
I threw away my blanket and stood naked,
And thanked God for that unexpected boon.

Her love is like a little dove
I found trembling on my doorstep one wintry morning.
I took it inside and nestled against my breast,
And made it happy
Giving it a drop from my heart’s warmth.

മരണത്തെ കാണാന്‍. 


മരണത്തെ കാണാന്‍
ഞാന്‍ മലമുകളിലേക്ക് പോയില്ല.
ഇരുളുറങ്ങുന്ന കൊല്ലികളിലോ
വിഷപ്പൂക്കള്‍ വിരിയുന്ന മുള്‍ക്കാടുകളിലോ
ഞാന്‍ മരണത്തെ കണ്ടില്ല.
ചേര്‍ത്തുപിടിച്ചു ചുംബിച്ചപ്പോള്‍
അവളുടെ കണ്ണുകളില്‍നിന്നും കുടിയൊഴിഞ്ഞ ഇരുളിനെ
മരണമെന്ന് ഞാന്‍ തിരിച്ചറിഞ്ഞു.    

Execution

Five backs in a line near the wire fence

That marks the sea off the land:

Five faces that face the sea.

I can see them from my window,

My window facing the sea,

The sea that knows all, contains all

And transforms all in its rolling mighty waves.

Five backs! With blank heads?

Or does some flash of memory

Disturb the darkness?

Perhaps, the flavour of a kiss,

The warm smell of naked breasts,

Love’s frolics, and a …

“Fire…!” The five backs sink

Into a confusion of twilight and blood.

Not a cry, not a groan…;

The sea entered their eyes.

The Bonsai

I am a bonsai.

Forbidden to me are the great heights

Where only the falcon dares spread his wings.

My arms will not reach the clouds;

Nor will my roots penetrate

The earth’s hard-burnt crust

And touch the evergreen kindness of her womb.

The dire grey square of the living room window:

My sky!

A cheerless wash of dull colours

Bordering the flimsy numerals on the calendar:

My sunset!

The young mango tree in the court-yard:

My next-door neighbor.

How I loved to see her blush a deep red

At the rain’s wet kisses!

‘Don’t fall into temptations, you there’,

Said my master, and he plucked both my eyes away.

I also loved to listen

To the bird-sung tales of the peepul tree

That revelled in the lusty arms of the wind.

‘Don’t listen to the tales of the wayward’,

Said my master, and he sealed my ears with lead.

Oh… this stifling darkness!

It gets the better of me.

I go sleepwalking to visions of valleys

Where the wind whistled

And cataracts unleashed their mirth.

But,

Nipping tenderly the shoots of my budding lust,

He would say:

Son, dreams are portends.

They tell you of the myth of freedom

Which is but a lie!

Suspend your senses,

Think only of the pot, and sleep…

Of course, without dreams.

Affliction

Once I felt there was a thorn in my heart

And put a hole on my chest to pull it out.

My finger drilled in where I missed one rib,

You know, God took it from me

To create ‘the frail thing’.

It seemed to my searching finger

That it lay further in, and every time

It slipped into deeper folds of flesh.

‘The little devil’, said I, and went on digging.

Don’t know how long, and now

One hole is left, open at both ends,

Through which an occasional wind whistles by.

Rubies Cube

A sneering jumble of reds and blues and greens,

Scattered over six faces and more unfolding,

This clever piece of toy ever deludes me,

Labyrinthine!

There were mango trees once all around my house:

My house in the village

Where the river flowed and fishermen whooped.

To walk these crowded streets

With their antique minerets

Smothered by concrete roofs

Makes one desperately nostalgic.

The mesh of angularities,

The dazzling blaze of asymmetry,

A sneering jumble of…

There were swings hung in the mango groves

That drew perfect semi-circles all my childhood days.

They knew the rustic rhythms of life,

The secret of survival and preservation,

The holy innocence of a blade of grass:

All that belonged to the past,

And only to the past.

‘No’, I sat back exhausted,

‘Never can I set it right.’

It lay there on my table

With its tiny coloured squares:

A clenched fist raised in challenge;

Enigmatic!

Suicide

What’s a knife for if not to kill oneself?

So I unsheathe him and place below my navel.

The milk-white blade, like an iced sardine,

Lies there, white and cold.

Look, he moves left,

Licks my side up with a hot tongue,

Counts my ribs, and like a licentious rascal,

Mouths my nipples, tickling.

“Enough you beggar.”

He laughs a crooked laugh, creeps to my midriff,

And with an artful leap, reaches my wet lips.

“Ah… what pleasure!” I throw my head back

And suddenly feel his hot-cold touch

Just beneath my throat.

Adam’s apple, like a cornered rat,

Runs beneath the skin.

The blade stills the ball for an instant,

And the elastic skin yields

To a sudden sharp thrust.

Blood!

It washes down my hairy front:

A march of corpuscles in a flood of lymph.

Too thin… Eh?

Then you need take some iron.

The Dialogue

What does this row of turfs remind me ?

O child, you are ephemeral!

What does this yew tree’s sad sleep tell me?

O child, only the sleep is real!

Why are these headstones so grave, so grave?

For child, death is graver than life!

Why do I love then the day’s blank light?

For child, you are not free to choose!

Tell me, then tell me, what choice means.

It has lost its meaning child!

How can a word but lose its meaning?

Meaning means its absence, child!

The Fall

From the top of the sky-scraper

I step dizzily into bare air.

Down… down…

Freely falling!

Ah… Galileo…

His old lead bullet…

Newton’s apple…

The law of gravitation…

The mysteries of the earth’s burning heart

Draw me.. draw me down!

The air is hissing past my ears.

The men, the women,

The children, their uniforms,

The cars, the rails,

The swimming pool,

White bodies in blue water,

Rush up…

Minute by minute magnified!

Oh… the speed!

Old laws of physics on the black board!

Multiply mass with velocity;

You’ll get momentum.

Now I understand:

the momentum

That does the work.

Blood rushes into my brain,

The equations vanish.

Now, the final crash..

The sudden gush of scarlet…

Ah… deliver me…!

The Rain

Udhas is singing.

Music melts into me

Like snow fakes, melting while falling.

Beneath a flock of clouds

Meeting and parting above, the park is growing dark.

Beneath the tamarind’s dusky contemplation,

The empty benches.

Udhas is singing

Music, in a baptismal shower,

Washes down the wounds of my existence

Expiating a thousand years’ nameless deadly sins!

Sitting under this banyan,

Listening to the silent tales of a million centuries

Smouldering into fine dust in its wooden grip,

I feel its foliage melting…

The distant pinnacles of the palace melting…

The stony mermaid’s frozen lament melting…

Everything melting down into me…

My lone soul!

In a sudden flash, the clouds split above…

One drop… there on my lips!

And there…, another on my eye!

Wetting the lashes, it spreads across

And tumbles down my cheek

Drawing down a line of cool.

It begins!

First in a low hush

Pattering over dry leaves.

Then it thickens behind the colonnade

And gathering power, like a mighty gale,

Closes in.

Beneath the sky,

Soaked in a shower of kisses,

I lose myself.

The Passage

Passing, passing

The endless stretch of rails,

The silver-glance of the sun on them,

The trees’ faint skeletons

And the ghost-wind roaming about…

Passing passing!

The rocks, the hills,

The train’s dead whistle that

Echoes from the crags,

The wind’s hollow boom among the reeds,

Broad lakes

And the thin smile of rivulets,

Passing passing!

The yoked bulls

And the peasant wearing his red turban,

A market full of noise,

A brooding cow on the hillside

Contemplating sunset,

Passing passing!

All move, all go, and now,

In a fading flock of grey wings

That criss-crosses the sky,

I see my own grey face,

Passing passing!

An April Morning at Mrs. Elizabeth’s Home

In purple and blue

She sat by the organ

Turned the gilded pages

And looked at her mother,

Silent.

‘O… she eminds me of her father’, the mother thought.

‘The quenched smile that forms

A half bloomed rose on her lips,

The complacent, yet superior air

That surrounds her being,

Dreams her companions,

Fed on endless ruminations:

The fond details

That make her his very child’.

Now, the fingers’ merry dance

On the blacks and whites,

The swelling symphony,

The diverse strains of music

Mingling with her mother’s smiles

And the happy choir of gay morning birds…

All melt into a single streak of sunshine

That paints her hair gold;

And here swells a long-dead world’s fading symphonies

In the mother’s mind.

The paths lined with sprouting memories

Lead to the streets of a loud city

Where once the chords of a lone guitar

Tried hard to harmonise

With myriad strains of bass and treble.

There she made her music

And perfected thence.

But me?

Four and twenty autumns with their swallows twittering,

Summers,

Springs,

Winters with their frozen lakes

Had their ebb and flow,

But no dolphin sang to me

The secret of standing joy.

‘My pleasures are fleeting,

My dreams don’t hold on’:

When I complain in my hours of sad visitations,

She would touch my muffled-up soul, and say:

‘Hold on, never give up,

For life’s like that;

You need only be honest to your dreams’.

That summed up her philosophy

Knit with her music’s delicate fabric

That would remind me of my life’s discord

And the great distances I yet had to cover.

That late morning, as I walked my way home,

Listening to nature’s music in the sweet spring shower,

With my thoughts-the candles

Forming strange shapes as they melt,

Her music filled my heart,

And strange sensations swelled within.

Again that strange harmony of notes;

And I don’t know even today, why,

Why my eyes welled up!

The Miracle

‘Listen …. O …. Listen’…., I shouted, but she didn’t;

Instead slammed the door right on my face!

Alas! What shall I do? What happened to us two?

Where all those past happy days are gone?

I can hear her sobbing on the bed,

The bed where we first shared our hopes and dreams.

How beauteous were those days when she and I

Danced with breeze and bees on hills and vales!

In spring she came with sprigs of lilac and

Flowers of chrysanthemum to deck my

Chamber walls, and in summer I went

South to tell the girl how I loved her.

Autumn proved a fruitful season too.

But as the seasons began to ripen

We could see petty differences rising

Between us and growing wide and strange.

She loved the sea while I preferred the hills.

My Yeats could not tolerate her John Keats.

Motzart and Michael Jackson quarrelled between us.

Once Stalin slapped Gandhi on his face and

He forgot how to turn the other cheek.

But time knows how to set things right.

Years after our differences melt at

A single smile of our beloved child

A single smile of our beloved child!

Posted by Jaison, the dreamer... at 7:44 AM 0 comments Links to this post   

ഓര്‍മകള്‍ക്ക് മണമുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍
ഓര്‍മകള്‍ക്ക് മണമുണ്ടെങ്കില്‍, അത്,
പോതിചോറിന്റെ വാടിയ വാഴയില മണമാണ്.
പഴകിയ കടുമാങ്ങയുടെയും, തണുത്ത പപ്പടത്തിന്റെയും,
കുതിര്‍ന്ന വേപ്പിലക്കട്ടിയുടെയും മണം.

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

ഞങ്ങളെ അറിയുക.

ഞങ്ങള്‍, ആകാശത്തെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നവര്‍.
ആകാശത്തിന്‍റെ അനന്ത സീമകള്‍ക്കും അപ്പുറത്തേക്ക്
ചിറകുകള്‍ വിരുത്തുന്ന
പക്ഷികളുടെ ആത്മാക്കള്‍.
ആകാശത്തിന്‍റെ നിറമേതെന്ന്
ഞങ്ങള്‍ വ്യാകുലപ്പെടുന്നില്ല.
അസ്തമയത്തിന്റെ കടും ചുവപ്പ്?
ഉദയത്തിന്റെ ഇളം ചുവപ്പ്?
മധ്യാഹനത്തിന്റെ തീക്ഷ്ണ വര്‍ണരാഹിത്യം?
ആകാശത്തിന്‍റെ നിറമേതെന്ന്
ഞങ്ങള്‍ വ്യാകുലപ്പെടുന്നില്ല.

സൂര്യനെയും സൂര്യകാന്തിപ്പൂക്കളെയും ഞങ്ങള്‍ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു.
ഇരുളുറങ്ങുന്ന കൊടും കാടിന്‍റെ നിഗൂഢതയും
ഗിരിശ്രുങ്ങങ്ങളുടെ ഉത്തുംഗ ഗാംഭീര്യവും
ഇണമാനുകളുടെ ശുഭ കാമനകളും
അനാദിയായ പ്രണയവും
ഞങ്ങളെ നമ്രശിരസ്കരാക്കുന്നു.

ഞങ്ങള്‍, അനന്ത കോടി നക്ഷത്രങ്ങളുടെ
പ്രണയ ഗീതികള്‍ കേട്ടു വളര്‍ന്നവര്‍.
ഇന്നലെകള്‍ ഇല്ലാത്തവര്‍. രാവിനെയും പകലിനെയും
ദുഃഖ സുഖങ്ങളെയും
ഒരുപോലെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നവര്‍.
രാവുള്ളതിനാല്‍ പകലുണ്ടായിരിക്കുന്നു
സുഖത്തിന്റെ പ്രാണന്‍ ദുഖത്തിലാണ് ഉള്ളത്.

ഞങ്ങള്‍ മഴയുടെ ഉടുക്കുപാട്ടിനെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു.
പഴുത്തു വിളഞ്ഞ നെല്‍കതിരുകളെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു.
ഇരട്ടവാലന്‍ കിളിയേയും കുയിലിനേയും
മഞ്ഞക്കിളിയെയും മയില്‍പീലിയെയും
വാഴനാരുകള്‍ കൊണ്ടു സ്നേഹത്തിന്റെ ഹൃദയം നെയ്യുന്ന തൂക്കനാം കുരുവിയെയും സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു.
ഞങ്ങള്‍ ഓണനിലാവിനെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു.
ഓണത്തുംബിയെയും ഓണപ്പാട്ടിനെയും സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു.
മഞ്ഞ കമ്മലിട്ട വിഷുപ്പുലരിയെയും പുല്‍നാംബിലെ കണ്ണുനീര്‍തുള്ളിയെയും ശംഖിലുറങ്ങുന്ന ഓംകാരത്തെയും
മണ്ണിന്‍റെ അപാരമായ കനിവിനെയും സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു.
കമിതാക്കളുടെ കണ്ണുകളില്‍ വിരിയുന്ന
അനന്ത നക്ഷത്ര കോടികളെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നു.
ഞങ്ങള്‍, സ്നേഹത്തിന്‍റെ, പ്രേമത്തിന്റെ,
നനുത്ത തൂവല്‍ സ്പര്‍ശത്തെ സ്നേഹിക്കുന്നവര്‍.
സമസ്ത പ്രപഞ്ചത്തിനും ലയം തീര്‍ക്കുന്ന
പ്രണയത്തിന്‍റെ വിശാലാകാശങ്ങളെ കാമിക്കുന്നവര്‍.