Deep from within

Poetry is a state of being, layered like an onion, peeled back till you reach the core and discover that there is no core but another layer which you peel back and the fleshy layers perspire a pungent aromatic stickiness - soul blood. Once you truly open a poem or are open to a poem – its soul blood remains with you.

Poetry is a state of becoming. Each poem that you read changes once you have taken it in. It mutates, surfacing when you need it most, like a genii.

Poetry is dreamtime, when waking and sleeping cross over into each other’s territories and a new reality emerges and reveals itself, glowing in the dark in such a manner that dark and light are one, fusing thought, image and emotion into words.

Lone poems seldom happen to me. More often, they arrive in twos and threes, in a series, one closely following on the heels of the other, as a necklace, a chain, a rosary, one after another. It takes me time to open the hidden vault to let them out – but when I do, I must let every one of them out.

Some emerge like swifts and vanish into the blue, others like gusts of cool breeze. Some are bubbles floating out – hovering then swinging away, others are gypsies who set off on their own journeys and do not turn back (there’s an old Narikuravar Gypsy belief – you turn back and you’ll dissolve as morning dew does on the grass as the sun comes out). Others are survivors from death camps, their eyes still floating in pools of dreams. The list is endless. But once they are out, I let them stand for themselves, to mean for themselves, to be reborn in the lives of those who read them. Having said this, I must also add… sometimes my poems are attached to each other – heads joined, hearts joined, limbs joined, eyes joined, one growing out of the other.

All my poems are one poem. One prayer. One sound. Deep from within. From the abyss. From the space that is the womb of the volcano. The breath of the void.

I want my poems to touch you quietly, when you are vulnerable, alone among crowds and streets and the noise of friendship; alone, suspended in a bubble of waiting, to enter in through the pores of your senses - flowing along with the gentle tide of a nubile river till they find their way to your lungs, to your heart, to your liver, to your spleen, to your stomach, to your womb, permeating every organ imperceptibly, till they fill you – your capillaries, your breath and the ripeness of your sex; fill you till you swell and rise in the night air and float away over rooftops beyond your city to faraway places where names, faces and addresses do not exist and your friendship finds the warmth of another and your longing discovers the cherryness of completion and your spirit dissolves in the clarity of a pure dawn.

I would often wonder where each poem I write is taking me (in terms of evolution of my spirit). I now realise that a creative act is actually a precious gifting of one’s self to the universe. Till one day there is nothing left to gift and I am free and “light”.

My poetry is a vegetable market. Coloured peppers piled high, reds yellows greens, pouring on to firm flowers of broccoli beside smooth bellies of gourds, set into a jewelled array of farm words, fresh flesh of flavours wrapped in textured skin still fragrant with the earth…born from an earth-heart watered by rivers and streams, rain mist and the tenderness of sun kisses.

My poetry is the narrow lane that leads from the brass noise of the city to its pulse source, the vegetable market, snake winding with scales of steaming teashops and snack bars and cobbler corners and ancient tailor stalls that have bred generations of master cutters and traditional healers with their magic potions, beggars and urchins, dogs, cats, pigs, perfumeries and rats as big as cats emerging at dead of night (when the night is absolutely dead, breathless and exhausted) and flower women heaving used breasts in the shadows and painted boys jingling their trinkets out of passing car windows.

My poetry is the dusty road that leads out of the city to hills scabbed with desolate forts of forgotten warriors and crested larks rise from scrub slopes into the lemon air alive with the bleat of goats and the fluted voices of children back from school. A family of rain quails cross down from the wooded slopes to my left over to the valley on my right and disappear, leaving behind footprints only I can feel.

My poetry celebrates departures and arrivals, losings and findings, wakings and sleepings, wanderings down the dusty road that leads out of the city that lies like a volcanic wound, throbbing then sinking then rising and overflowing.

My poetry is the view from atop the hills that looks down into the valley where the road freewheels out of the city, gasping with freedom. It follows the clouds of dust back to the pulse source of its brass noise, down the narrow lane lined by tailors, healers, beggars, urchins, rats, pigs, dogs, cats and the night that breathes flowered women and painted boys. It wanders among the aubergines and custard apples till it reaches the dark heart of dreaming asparagus and artichokes.

My poetry rises from the butcher’s altar into the air like a pariah kite, wingtips curving and swirling till it catches a thermal and floats beyond…beyond the city the road out of the city, out of the hills, feathers exploding into the blue. Finally free.

Gift from the sun

Two decades ago I trekked along the banks of the sacred Narmada river, experiencing her moods as they changed each moment. The waters flowed through light and shade, colours shifting imperceptibly from brown to grey to pale jade to deep jade to dark jade and moss green. When it turned crystal clear and slowed its pace at Haran Paar, its shallowest point, I kicked off my shoes and sat chest-deep in the cool liquid which gently licked my skin. With palms resting on the pebbled bed my gaze skimmed along the skin of the water clouded with dragonflies. They came in different colours, appearing and disappearing, light dissolving them and shade giving them form. Layers of cool water which swirled around my buttocks and thighs, over my wrists and elbows became warmer when they reached my chest. Tiny fish nibbled at my skin.

My body was slowly taken over by the elements and only my thoughts and feelings remained floating on the surface of my consciousness like the dragonflies, between light and shade. The snout of a crocodile appeared midstream and I watched it sail away till it was lost in the blaze of light. A white breasted kingfisher hovered above me, plummeted into the water a few feet away and vanished into the shade. All life moved between the two extremes, constantly veering from visibility to invisibility, glowing like epiphanies, turning eclipses, rising and setting. Sometimes my thoughts and feelings became one, fused into energy fields – sudden shimmering flashes – like those I once experienced as a child when lying on the lawn in my aunt’s estate, looking up at the sun haloing the petals of sweet peas. I imaged that they were the gifts of the sun for those who could see them. Since I could see them, they belonged to me. They were gifts given to me.

The sun gave me many gifts along my growing years. I was always grateful for them. They were so wholesome, nourishing and rejuvenating that even through my darkest growing years they reminded me that all life had a meaning – every experience, pleasant and unpleasant, damning, boring, hopeful, desperate, uncertain and mysterious. Every broken moment lay still for a while and if one cared to take notice, began gently moving then crawling and floating and reaching out like the green tendril of a plant towards light. Like the potted plant on the bookcase in our home long ago got tired of the shade and began moving towards the lighted window, sending out tendrils that gently crept over Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Bernd Heinrich’s Life Everlasting: The Animal Way Of Dying, spent a while quite still till it continued on its way across Charles Darwin’s Journey Of The Beagle. The tip of the tendril groped the air after it had traversed Apsley Cherry Gerard’s The Worst Journey In The World, then lifted gently and miraculously rose into the air until it touched the wall edge of the window and continued its way across the glass pane, its pale green belly breathing invisibly as it went along. One night there was a storm and thunder buckled the dark air. Streaks of lightning lit up the silhouette of the creeper, haloing it with light.

Sitting there, almost reclining, in the shallow hem of the Narmada, I was suddenly overcome by fear and uncertainty. I had given myself up to the elements to such an extent that I could hardly feel myself anymore. My hands and legs had become numb, my buttocks and torso didn’t seem to belong to me, the parts of me above the water seemed to be floating, suspended on the river’s skin, I had become one of the many boulders along the Narmada’s banks. The transformation was unsettling and I struggled to detach my body and mind from the form of the boulder and become myself again. It took time before I could get myself to move.

Slowly, very slowly, I returned to my body and felt my legs and hands and arms and buttocks begin shifting, no more in harmony with the water and the riverbed but there as an outsiders.

Before I raised myself out of the water, I allowed my fingers to feel around the surface of the riverbed and pick up a stone. They brought it out of the river, gleaming. It was a jasper. Small and polished fine into a near perfect oval. I was about to return it to the riverbed when sunlight caught it and shone a halo around it, turning it into a gift.

A poem comes to me like a gift from the sun. It is the summation of the play of light and shade. It is what remains after an intense communion with otherness. It is a jasper polished smooth and oval by the elements.