Poem 1
From Book-II: the Sequence “Siddharth”

 

 

(My audio version of this poem is available in the Mad Hatters' Review --online issue 8, July 2007)

 

At Siddharth

At Siddharth
I eat a fluffy omelette;
it must vanish
in the dimness of music.

Fork is too sharp and stinging.

For ages that banyan tree had stood
before the little restaurant
and Manni had gone round it and round it
with a cotton thread
freshly and finely spun from her spinning wheel.

And the moss-driven roots had
gone into the earth for new searches.

But then the cotton seeds do not give more crops
at some stage
and we must shelter
the magic flames near the trees of Bhrtrihari—
that great poet who wandered from jungle to jungle
in search of all-elusive peace.

At the whorls of the white magma of Garbhaji
Bhanu laughed
though bewildered that the bounding monkeys
coming out of silence
should be so stitched in one elastic strain.

He lisped strange syllables.

Vedic syllables after Vedic syllables
drawn by elastic monkeys.

Or were they mere English syllables?

But it was a new burden—
how to protect the cotton seeds
or make concrete roofs over the wind-driven flames
or to search for black phallic stones
or to find the tiger’s yellow cave
that he made himself
and for himself.


        Arun Gaur

 

 

 

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