Golden Light
There’s a time of day
to witness nature’s crown in the sky.
One can say with some honesty
that customary mornings
oftentimes
make the magic of incantatory forms
dissipate and not quite appear
as they do around sunset.
That’s the perfect point
to catch golden inflections.
When the curtain of light
opens itself.
When the evening clouds
are in repose
and no longer believe in spreading
their day-long expanse of lucid blue.
This particular day,
my eyes could see
a final blink from the sun,
appearing without any inhibition,
like melting butter,
as if the ancestors themselves
were purveyors of this beauty.
**
Such a canvas is somber.
The crows becoming incarnates
of the departed
and those stoic cows are at leisure,
patches of pleasant white and brown
with the green around them,
as I feed them
customary portions of the day’s feast.
Witnessing all this is the river
around whom a ministry of faith
rings in evening bell tolls
and distant incantations;
a sacred geometry since ancient awakenings.
This scenery,
with the sun soft and dappled with life,
a whole lineage reminisced in prayer,
build up the laws of life
and an almost incantatory mystery
is in all of this,
a mute songcraft only heard by a few.
The rituals of the day
and a reprieve to the soul
always bathed in golden light.
NOTE: this poem is based on the Hindu/ Indian tradition of Pitrapaksha, in which we pray for departed elders, preparing a vegetarian feast in their name and then offering portions of it to crows and cows, in sacred consonance with them being symbols of the soul, of the mortal world.
On such a day, I saw nature mingling with the somber mood of this observation.
Morning Hour
My eyes wait for that perfect morning hour,
the day dawning with rekindled sparks to spare
and I know I’ll be looking at new beauty repossess this haunt of mine.
I choose the river, always,
actually the riverside,
walking along the only serene edges of concrete,
to still feel I’m human,
in love with the forms of these men I see,
soaking up sweat
and easing the portent of life and death,
with just a kind look
or a sincere smile,
held a little longer, yes,
or deflecting a meddling sun’s revival as an orb of blinding light at nine.
What they see is a boy in love with these elements,
the changing moods of this eternally stoic river
and a different tinge and hue to these familiar faces,
so in complete love with the way the sky seems to melt,
with their exhaustion;
and the water tempts them with a shared communal ablution,
to wash away their unsavoury birth marks
and egos bigger than that,
designed for them by heretics and bigots.
***
I’m here to say, ‘ I see you’
like the two of them,
friends or lovers or strangers,
knowing each other
for as long as this vista makes them
open up to each other,
for these meetings.
Those two men.
They have a heart for feeding birds,
or fishes,
or just being in love with this river;
as those little crumbs trail their fifteen minutes of solitude.
I’m here to say, ‘ I see you’
for your solidarity,
for your united front,
for the lushness of those everyday spirits.
I’m here to say,
‘I see you’,
all you lush gardeners pruning nature,
to its nifty, verdant former glory since March
as I see little boys on bicycles wearing smiles under masks,
reflecting eyes of youth
and there are assorted lovers tanning their dry souls on the riverbed.
They call their best friends from the other side of the riverfront,
some daring to swim that short distance of a stone’s throw away,
some saying that the boat rides till the red bridge will be underway.
I see you
as you see me.
Weren’t we all strangers previously and will remain so?
But these mornings are the best
and we all have our photographic memories to spare,
for each other.
We know our eyes will no longer wait for a kindling spark alone,
as we look at beauty repossess this haunt of ours,
waiting with bated breath for that blessed morning hour.
Flowers
I am haunted.
The flowers that I plucked from the garden,
to mark some legacies,
have become garlands,
arranged for the beloved,
fallen bird whom I buried,
his face down under the shrubberies,
entranced by his final sleep and an
eternal dream-hour.
And petals drip and drop,
falling into open mouths
as family names leave with the nip in
the air,
far beyond cosmic dilemmas.
I am haunted
because my departed bird has left his
body
and flown over the tip of the temple,
as I imagine,
uncaged and free among the
evergreens, the river.
In the spot below the dead flowers,
where I buried him,
is where his still wings sleep.
**
There was a garden there,
some unfinished moulds of potteries
lay in a neat column,
with roses meant to fill their round,
filigreed bodies
and we promised to fill them each
with mud
and practice some gardening of our
own.
**
I put some dead flowers pressed together,
in cellophane sheets,
take them home,
wash them clean,
to watch them wither and be blown away,
like charred paper;
and then muse with an elegy in my soul,
for their asphyxiated last breaths
before I saw them hence.
For flowers grow out,
for the decorousness of experience,
the euphoria of youth,
for the silence in which we caressed
each other’s bodies with rose petals.
Some grow, shrivel or are inflamed in
electric crematoriums,
with sagging, wrinkled last sighs
and their scents and faint colours
limn bones in the last sounding of the conch.
**
Flowers are the only ones who make
an appearance,
on tables where Grandma kept them,
to adorn her morning tresses,
to use their fragrance to press
together our spirits buoyed by smell.
On that very table are her spectacles,
little, inconspicuous microscopes
that read between the lines,
to find multiple histories embedded within.
Everything haunts me now,
because flowers carry their scents
from twoscore years before,
hidden in cupboards and strangled by
spines of books nobody reads
anymore.
It haunts me
because I have left little flowers
everywhere for clues.
The question is,
what messages will I be leaving
behind with them
as discovery is yearned for now?
My flowers make do with that anticipation.
11 O’Clock, Monday Morning
You defer that next meeting
at the doctor’s,
knowing that to talk to oneself,
for far too lon
makes poor verbiage of one’s days;
and worse for wear is your mind.
naturally then you look at yourself
a certain way
and then to see round eyes of others’
pronounced judgements
is a slow death.
***
It minces your thoughts,
word by word,
little by little.
You see yourself as a jester and a fool,
testing out your own expressions
before the mirror
and then imagining the doctors’
reactions too.
They swim like floating weeds,
coming up to the surface without
clarity amongst dirty pools
and you somewhere are sure that
the three letter word is on your mind.
MAD.
*
That’s why you seek your shadows
in convenient silences,
stretched out throughout the
longevity of teenage
and young adulthood.
***
But now you are about to touch
your thirties
and shame is what you need to barter
with the devil on your shoulder.
For years,
he bespoke your innocence
and ignorance,
disguising them as parameters of bliss
So enough with him.
You have marked the meeting,
spending Sunday ticking by,
like an implosive time-bomb of sorts.
And then,
you gather your twitching thoughts
together.
Palpitating about how the perpetual
traffic in motion
means that nobody really stops,
to work or feel or see.
Certainly not to see you like this.
They just move
They just move
Or spin in the same static time zones.
Your brow receives a light downpour
then
and your body gets cold,
from counting the number of closed
switches in the rooms
and checking the stove in the kitchen,
for the twentieth time within a
minute.
***
11 O’ Clock,
Monday morning.
marked for a show of reality.
And when the doctor does raise his
brows
and makes you more nervous by the
earnestness of the session,
being as he is human,
or just acting professional,
you doubt if coming here was worth it
And your mind keeps moving
and moving,
in a static frame,
of what it means to go there
in the first place.
When Truth Hits The Bulls’ Eye
Truth hits the bull’s eye
when birds fly like flying saucers
from building tops at daybreak
and drop to the ground
by midnoon,
like the last war sirens claimed them,
for their own ritualistic supplications.
Truth hits the bull’s eye
when for the millionth count, I say,
“I’m ready to leave home”
until it becomes another dream
and fratricide visits the home next
door,
like it was always on the son’s
mind.
**
Scorched Earth bleeds,
stigmata on the hands of a slain saint
and his lover of spirits scales up the
Cross,
asking for reformation,
for all.
But Lazarus isn’t his name
and even his deity sleepwalks,
humming a soft breeze,
all mumblecore,
heard only by his mother,
cremated on the side of the citadel.
***
Truth pinches our abdomens
and swallows our last words.
Words can sometimes become formal
friends,
quoting the law in our presence
and forgetting the weight of the world
*when minors get under
the weights of retired men
and abuse is reframed as a jumbled
up term.
In the long run,
skeletons tumble out of the closet
to hug them,
just like their abusers did,
their chests carved with survivors’
souls,
crying out for a new truth
for their own children.
It never arrives,
not even with a whimper*
**
It’s the truth
when a hard worker is victimized by
class consciousness.
Watching the river
and a lush garden
from the shabby confines of his room,
putting his humanity in a box
along with antibiotics
and a pill-shaped locket,
hanging loosely by his collar.
Ain’t that the whole truth
nothing but the truth,
My Lord?
That plagues come and go
but hypocrites rule the roost
and politics of the third wave expires,
as cities open up their shutters
and people peel off their masks,
their faces runny with deceit.
**
Actually the truth is
that childhood memories fly away
into the distance,
like embers from yesteryears,
nature takes a great deal
out of our sensibilities
and crop stubs still burn,
like hearts set on fire by mindcraft.
In all this,
The truth burns,
like an unforgettable fire.
Prithvijeet Sinha from Lucknow, India. He is a post graduate in MPhil from the University of Lucknow, having launched his prolific writing career by self-publishing on the worldwide community Wattpad since 2015 and on his WordPress blog An Awadh Boy’s Panorama.
Besides that, his works have been published in several varied publications as Cafe Dissensus, The Medley, Screen Queens, Confluence, Reader’s Digest, Borderless Journal, Aspiring Writers’ Society, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Chamber Magazine, Live Wire, Rhetorica Quarterly, Ekphrastic Review, The Quiver Review, Dreich Magazine and in the children’s anthology Nursery Rhymes And Children’s Poems From Around The World ( AuthorsPress, February 2021), among others.
His life force resides in writing.
