Evocation (Completed..!)

Dead leaves light, ready in frolick,
crisper than the best of chips.
With a crunchy sound you are crushed
into a thousand flickery pieces.

In a nice cookie's dark brown tone you
invite. If my sense hadn't meddled, my
sensibilities would have had you
popped in, my throat shall have choked!

Dry leaves on cobblestone paths
and on brown earth ready for the frosts.
Falling from tired branches with an ease that
fail with the words I have tried to wrought.

I pity you this autumn day for there
are no breezy winds to saunter you away-
To those cosy nooks you had sought
when fluttering, shivering from branches above.

Strewn around like warriors on a battle ground,
would you be turned into humus or fade off
like memories of kintergarden teachers
whose grandeur, age only seems to tear asunder?

Why oh crisp creatures do you with your
dark brown cookie colors wake up in me
a scent of Tragedy? Of no particular rhyme,
no reason but leave my full being lost and forlorn.

You are not to be blamed though as
Roschachs wouldn't be or a couple of
downed pegs couldn't be nor that simple strain
that made me cry alone in last year's rain.

Bears out the fact that the poetic mode alone has the freshness and incisiveness to carry protest

http://www.hindu.com/lr/2003/12/07/stories/2003120700300400.htm

Daddy's Tale

Sleep my pretty child, sleep deep
Days could grow long, this moon shall eclipse.
The night now is dark and sweet,
breeze and dew unfailing;
the dreams yet are fairytales,
mommy's lullaby accompanying.
Lock em safely in deep vaults child,
age them like wine.
Collect ye leaves and petals and
press them in your mind.

I wish your days don't stretch like mine
but someday you would see-
that dried petals and old wine
are certain cures for reality.

Choice

I itch to write long sentences
and track all my curious thoughts.
I wish to paint in oils the combinations
nature forgot. I ache to
to wander the green campus
and photograph against it beautiful nymphs
and to roam the city and graph its
sickly sweet sights.

But would I recognise the trade-offs,
find the will to stand by this life,
and turn blind to other petty ones
that constantly woo a baser mahesh.

I am posting the speech that was the fountainhead of the most popular definition of Democracy, Lincoln's famous Gettysberg Speech. Lincoln has been such a great inspiration for slow starts like me!

This speech was a non-event during the occasion for which it was prepared yet in due course its intrinsic value shined, illuminated by his solid ethos.

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE DEDICATION OF THE CEMETERY AT GETTYSBURG

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain--that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom--and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

The Fly

In my mind there is a memory of a fly. It settled against pale yellow furniture one night in the library. After a million-flutters abuzz-flight, it settled down peacefully near my knuckles. If I hadn't seen it I wouldn't have known it. It pressurized not and its whole weight was too light to constitute even a touch.

The house fly same in Lucknow as in Chennai, apparently. Like the dozen others I have observed in my life time with primitive eyes that never get the differences right. The same grey exterior, the same transparent wings, the same way of rubbing its forelimbs together. I fancied it to refer to common leifmotifs that do not leave you even if you are not particularly obsessed by them-the house fly is one, the other is boring professors.

While we are still at it, one more from the same poet. This is an old Tamil song translated so effectively by A K Ramanujan. I am not very sure, but I guess the song is from the author's translation volume, Interior Landscapes, a translation of 'Aganaanuru', which deals with the courtship, marital love labyrinth.

What could my
mother be to yours?
What kin is my father
to yours anyway?
And how did you and
I meet ever? But in
love our hearts have
mingled like red earth
and pouring rain.

Many stay puzzled by the name I had chosen for my blog. Maybe what follows shall be justification enough...

STILL LIFE by A K Ramanujan

When she left me
after lunch, I read
for a while.
But suddenly wanted
to look again
and I saw the half-eaten
sandwich,
bread,
lettuce and salami,
all carrying the shape
of her bite

(bold mine)

I am wordless to comment! Whatdya people say?

This is a poem I wrote almost an year back. I agree that it might not make much sense to
anyone than me. But I love it for its imagery. What would you love it for?

The Living Dead

In the obsolescence that is fast becoming life
The green of the grasses isn't yet white, yet
the sun is paler the moon darker, the raging
ebb and tide of the oceans a pittance to what's inside.

Seething in thy heart's recess and tides
there lie different beings waking in contrasts;
The baked surface cracks often when the
seed waiting for its fortune comes against the bulwark.

I said wow! The sun that so lovely mildly touching
the walls of the building: There was none around
and the orphan beauty made be lonely. Tis not the sun
alone, nor others blind. There is a hole in the heart: that's news.

Schizoid's son. Melting cans. In the hot sun
the cracking fields. Thus runs the faultlines across my
heart. That the only love that I could ever feel
with welling tears is for the kid, the dog; the ants that tide across my path.

The Blind Attractions of an Adolescent Cow

On Sunday I went to the city to get myself some passport-sized photographs. The place I had to wait to catch the bus back to the Institute belonged to cows and dungheap. I have read and seen in those stylised actions of the Spanish bullfighters how Bulls are inspired by that deep intense red. It is some amorous color for Bulls!

There ofcourse weren't any Bulls where I waited. There were a lot of cute looking beings which were somewhere between being a calf and a cow. I have always considered cows with a certain empathy, even a certain love. Manythings about them were beautiful. The way they ever so languidly walk-not the irrevocable, incurable laziness of the buffaloes-their big shapely eyes that seem to be richly outlined with kaajal-so much like those of deers...its difficult not to like them. Sometimes somewhere I see girls I can compare with these lovely beings.

Well as I said I was waiting. And there was this,lets say adolescent cow just hanging around the place. It was some time before it sighted me. Only after a few seconds could I notice that it was getting interested in me, making as it were imperceptible moves in my direction. I was in no mood to shoo it away as it did not seem to be agressive and as it yet hadn't grown any horns. So I just let it on its course and moved away graciously thinking that I was in its path and not the other way round.

I only expected it go its way. Yet it came resolutely, obviously towards me-as if I was a bunch of plantain or banana leaves. I pushed its head away from me. I egged its body away from me. It too persisted. Then I looked at myself and then I saw: dark green pants, a bright green shirt which for the should have been the most attractive color in the 7'O clock darkness and a very very apt dark green plastic cover in my hands.

How the Name Came About.

My friend Sonia named herself in MSN as 'Oh names what a pain!'. I felt so too when all my names were rejected one after another as aleady being taken.

My first choice (of salutation) was Phaedrus after that intense hero of Robert M. Pirsig's first novel 'The Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'.
My second attempt was to have thesundew my long-running hotmail and yahoo id. That came to naught too.
Then came to mind, frangipani, buoyed because I had found the name of a flower i had been in love for so long. Well, not yet lucky.
Then I keyed in confidently, 'theshapeofherbite'. I knew many people shall immediately imagine erotica; such it is common evocation. But the phrase has as its fountainhead a poem by A K Ramanujan titled Still Life.

I am blogging inspired in great part by my college mates Venkat and Sabnis.

Especially Sabnis. I was pleasantly alarmed because during all my occasional visits to his blog I see him write things I thought only I had noticed, felt and thought. Like the funny negotiations with the water-sprinklers, his paean to frangipani (I am happy the flower hasn't just a solitary fan), his photographs of the oils monsoon created across the evening sky, his alarm at hosteliers stealing his songs during morning baths...I think my alarm is similar to that alarm of his! Oh...here are my thoughts, feelings, and observations which I had been so privately enjoying...so much so that I begin to have proprietary sentiments over them, and then here is Sabnis blogging them. Some jealousy...!

So I thought I shall say, here arrives a rival over almost the same 'subject-matters'.