Poetry by Nisheedhi

1. Poetry of the moment
:Volume 2
Short Poetry
nisheedhi

2. Poetry of the moment :Volume 2
Short Poetry
nisheedhi

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4. Contents
Ashes 1
Existence 2
On return to Mumbai 3
The interview 4
Sleep 5
Wounds 7
The lasting silence 8
The angel in red stole my clothes 9
The death of a leader 10
The last lecture 11
Terror in a cafe 12
On failing to get admittance to the Taj Mahal 13
On my mother’s first death anniversary 14
At the GRT hotel in Chennai 15
Images in a train journey 16
Evening in the Hampi rocks 17

5. Clay-pot 18
At the Jehan Numa Hotel in Bhopal 19
A dog’s death 20
The Vaishnavite 21
Death of a woman 22
Mother Kali 23
My fellow-passenger in the train 24
Tracking the elephants in the Wyanad forest 25
Existence 26
The laughing Buddha 27
This is a mere dream 28
Possession 29
An October morning 30
The destitute children of Mumbai 31
The stone-cutter 32
On visit to Kalady ,the birthplace of Adi Sankaracharya 33
Assurance 34

6. Tribute to the Buddha at the Shanti Stupa in Leh 35
White memory 36
My falling sick 37
The death of a leader 38
The death of a communist 39
Scatter 40
Our beautiful birds are yet to come 41
Break is not another morning 42
Girl in the park 43
The box 44
The joke 45
Spring 46
Winter 47
Midnight music 48
Words 49
Bodies of consciousness 50
The megalomaniac quiz master 51

7. Marriage 52
The white tiger of Rewa 53
Phases 54

8. Ashes
Then the drama continued
As the chants were spoken
From the guttural depths
Of a middleman’s throat.
The pursuit of silver went on
In the waters in sound and words
Chasing multitudes of
Life and death shadows
The waters flowed silently
Over the rocks nurturing life
And its golden-brown ashes.
(As I watched the ritual of immersion of ashes of the dead being
performed in a river in Karnataka)
1

9. Existence
Here a talking man is sleeping,
His arms akimbo, feet in the air.
Then were wild gesticulations,
Sweat on brow, fire in the eyes
Now vacant and unconnected.
He no longer exists in space
But he had happened in time
Whatever begins shall remain.
(On the death of Ramachandra Rao ,a relative )
2

10. On return to Mumbai
The city is daylong and sea –backed
The sea-child deeply dangled his feet
Into the sea at the misty radio club
Near the cockroach-ridden sea palace
Bringing back a tide of memories
Years ago, I had bought my identity
Here, in a piece of paper, full of lies
And endless possibilities of hurt
In the fragrant harbour to come .
Now the sea is calm but afraid
I see Rukmini’s lying-in hospital
Along with the juice hair parlours.
Stock- brokers rub rotund stomachs.
Scared dons account for deaths
There ,at the junction , in a sea of cars
Stand these muddy-haired children
They have a nasty habit of poking
Their outstretched grubby hands
Directly into the holes of your eyes.
(On return from a three year stint in Hong Kong-literally the fragrant
harbor)
3

11. The interview
One went into deep slumber fully aware
The air did not touch nor melodiously sing
The tweet of the gray bird went over and again
As the helpless chick tried to find way
Hemmed in by clusters of grass squares
The mind’s baby gurgled as if threatening
It got mixed up in the easily penetrable skull
The story of someone deeply drowning
Hold your breath and flap your wings
While your daughter’s saving dupatta floats
The elephant-God whispered in your ears
As the sun went down the shimmering lake
We all waited impatiently to be hurt deeply
The head- shrinker asked several searing questions
Pretending petrified wisdom of the pure mind
The phantoms went their way, their job done.
(The promotion interview where the head shrinker thought I was not
fit enough for the onerous position of general manager)
4

12. Sleep
The birdsong came back
This time with a bearded man
The sky was deep blue
In the mountains and beyond
And gently touching them.
The man’s eyes slept for long
The blue in them disappeared,
Above the yellowed stone shelter,
Into the translucent April sky.
It had rained from the white sky
And he had slept and slept
As if he had not woken up
From yesterday’s deep sleep
And the sleep of the day before
When my car had passed.
His breathing was rhythmic
And there was no warm life.
Yesterday his eyes were open
And today his breath stirred
Under the unkempt beard
Tomorrow under the blue sky
When my car will pass this way
There will be a gray space
Then my eyes will turn away
I shall roll down the panes.
(Concerning a vagrant I used to see sleeping in a stone shelter
every day when I was commuting in my car between Sivakasi and
5

13. Rajapalayam in Tamilnadu)
6

14. Wounds
In the recent monsoon
Our rivers felt as if
The mountains had bled
From fresh wounds
Their flesh has gone,
Across the green seas,
To the distant Chinaman
To fill out his bones.
(Iron ore exports to China in the wake of the pre-Olympics
construction boom have left deep wounds on our mountain scape in
the Hospet region)
7

15. The lasting silence
When your eyes go astray and balled
No thumping on the chest revives music
Distant listening and hair in a close mat
An electric shock here, needle piercing there
Does nothing to bring your world back.
There is this red liquid and a trail of words
There is then lasting silence where rhythm was.
(As I watched my mother breathing her last)
8

16. The angel in red stole my clothes
The angel in the red had taken my bag
My body arrived all in a piece as a guest
In the sky- land of a liquor comeuppance
As the red bird had flown low and high
It forgot my bag’s existence in the universe
But brought this bag of bones with verse
And would, with an apologetic click, reverse.
My honor was surely at stake for the day
As it ended with everything red and dead
With not even clothes for this bag of bones.
(My baggage ,booked in Jabalpur airport for Raipur went astray and
I had to wait for a full day before I could reclaim my luggage)
9

17. The death of a leader
He always looked for a catch
Amid complex loops of reason-
In the people logic of democracy
And the fine arithmetic of men.
He had them coming everywhere;
He promised them rice and jobs.
His words were hopes, sparks
That flew off from under his toes
As he walked their mud tracks.
His eyes now float upwards
On the hill, in the thick forest
His pockets are full of rain
And the helicopter’s whir.
(The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Mr.Rajasekhara Reddy has
been killed in a helicopter crash in the dense forests on his way to a
public meeting)
10

18. The last lecture
In the last lecture there is space left
Briefly only to be occupied all time
The space that will exist all time, lacking
In substance like a quarry in the hillock,
Which exists as long as the hillock lasts.
Let us imagine the quarry hole filled with dark;
You stand on the rim of the hole that exists
In absence of space and presence of time.
You now hit tangentially Randy Pausche’s lecture
You do not immediately get into his circle-
The circle of an inspiring cancer death,
The circle of dark quarry humor with a twist.
You merely stand on the rim and lean into the dark
Straining your eyes to see own reflection down there.
(Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your
Childhood)
11

19. Terror in a cafe
Reluctantly we set this down
Surely somebody up there
Is holding our lovely earth up
And the blue sky and the stars
And all else from falling.
Except in the Leopold café
Where bodies fall from behind
Which have just eaten roti.
If only they knew that waiting
For rice would make them fall.
A young man with rucksack
Had just come across the sea .
There was a gleam in his eye.
(Concerning the death of Mr.Gopalakrishnan ,our colleague in the
terror shootout in the Leopold cafe in Mumbai where he had come
to eat his dinner with some colleagues).
12

20. On failing to get admittance to the Taj Mahal
Yesterday’s eye-red was but a phase
Having lost the moonlight all the way
Behind large doors and khaki authority
(When we pray in marble mosques
We tend to get killed on Fridays
Because beauty does not really matter
But only the blood-red duty-call)
In the end we see where the king went
In the cold cellar,past earthly beauty
The priest’s God-call pierced the vault
As beauty is not truth,only coldness.
13

21. On my mother’s first death anniversary
At four the morning was night.
A bird landed on the plastic sheet
Waking up too early for the worms
For the other birds’ comfort on the tree.
The tube light whined sorrowfully
Against Octavio Paz and certain poet
In the inner tube of my computer.
Mother would come with rice balls
In Sanskrit incantations and dhoti
Tied across my waist and thread.
All we lay stretched on the floor
Remembering her dead a year ago.
Night will soon be morning birds
Their noisy calls were like that time
When she laughed the last time.
14

22. At the GRT hotel in Chennai
I sat in the crowded ground floor cafe
Sipping brown coffee over a pastry
A white man came down with a thud
In the hotel lift, bright and gleaming
The white woman wore fresh and fragrant
Threads of strung jasmines in her hair
Just like the other ebony-backed woman
With luminescent flowers on her back.
That black woman down there laughed
As her curled pigtail wavered rhythmically.
She had no jasmines in her matted hair.
The rains were so much like back home
The filth overpowering and strangely familiar.
I look down on the world through the glass
Behind the blue-haze of the rain-curtains
From the sixth floor room of my hotel
Wondering if the twitch of that woman in red
Meant unequivocally that I actually existed.
15

23. Images in a train journey
The woman there was a mere image
The way her eyes flashed at her husband
As she changed the nappies of the child
The child swung in the cloth-cradle, gently,
Like a weaver bird swings in the fibrous nest
He cried , he gurgled ,he knocked about-
A mere image in another image’s existence
This woman did not know she was an image
But I knew she was an image ,just an image.
16

24. Evening in the Hampi rocks
The evening swapped the orange sky
For a silver-lined cloud in tatters
The rocks sizzled through the day;
At sundown their fever subsided.
Their blazing orange desires ebbed
In the nucleus of their inner being.
Time had burnt them to perfection
Beyond the pale of their stony selves.
Their sun-smell touched the bushes
Quickening life in their brown limbs.
As the sun sank behind the world’s edge
Their shadows disappeared in the sky.
17

25. Clay-pot
The lights glistened forgetfully
Yesterday over fried potatoes.
It was just a whiff of thought
These bones in the clay-pot.
(Memory of my mother)
18

26. At the Jehan Numa Hotel in Bhopal
In yesterday’s laughing wind and rain
The trees waved helplessly on my window
A spiritual lady separated my spirit
From my morbid mind, body and intellect
Buffeted by a moist wind-blown illness
In this history room the royals reveled
Separated by sunless fog-screens of time
The wind howled all through the night
My consciousness grappled with the body.
19

27. A dog’s death
He had come into us, running,
Yelling, in crescendo of pain.
Then all was peremptorily still.
The car stopped, screeching
Only to scrape bloody flesh
Off the muddy bumper: actually
He was chasing steel shadows
Which had no business there.
(Homage to a dog which came under our car on a highway in
Kerala)
20

28. The Vaishnavite
The luminous red-and-white chalk-lines
On our profoundly furrowed foreheads
Extended ,over temple towers and tenement tops,
Into anarchic aggregation of scriptural argument
The truth lay, not in monistic oneness,
Not even in dualistic separateness
But in the fiery union of the flesh with the spirit.
21

29. Death of a woman
She stared at the wooden beam
The wood that was once a tree
A tailless lizard came from the beam
kitta kitta kitta said the lizard
She who had become ‘it’ stared
At the beam that was once a tree
The beam looked at the lizard
The continuum flowed endlessly .
(Upon the passing away of my mother-in-law)
22

30. Mother Kali
Mother Kali’s magnificent eyes
Were moist with maternal tears
As Bengal squirmed at bygone glory
The loss of its literature trophy
Has left its bhadralok bewildered
and bereft, entirely.
(concerning the mysterious theft of the Nobel prize for Literature
won by Rabindra Nath Tagore)
23

31. My fellow-passenger in the train
She sat,cross-legged ,
With her eyes screwed up .
Energy swelled within her
In waves after rising waves
Only to break, boisterously,
On rocky shores of nothingness.
Her cell phone rang fitfully
Interrupting gradual formation
Of penciled shapes,in her mind,
Of her future textile creations.
Her shapes, not still forms,
But frenetically moving images
Sizzled and then vaporized
In split-second transience.
24

32. Tracking the elephants in the Wyanad forest
The elephants were hard to come out;
They had their strong sylvan reasons.
Our timid tribal guide called out to Surya
Who had his elephant feet tied to the tree.
There was black fear in his beady eyes.
25

33. Existence
Here a talking man is sleeping,
His arms akimbo, feet in the air.
Then were wild gesticulations,
Sweat on brow, fire in the eyes
Now vacant and unconnected.
He no longer exists in space
But he had happened in time
Whatever begins shall remain.
26

34. The laughing Buddha
He had an answer to all our questions
But no questions to our ready answers
His ears were long and non-hearing
As were his eyes small and crinkly.
It was not he who patted his tummy
And laughed to the vulgar crowds loud
Just a yellow figurine on dusty shelves.
Did you say he had frozen in bronze
With an enormous stomach side-splitting?
Actually our fears froze behind his ears
I can hear their crunch in these leaves.
27

35. This is a mere dream
A lone crab struggled
In a puddle of scalding water
There were voices around
All happened in a split-second
When someone shouted
Pull him out, for God’s sake;
This is a mere dream.
28

36. Possession
She lay there sprawled, wailing.
Anger burst out of the bounds
She had crossed all body-barriers
Just when sanity finally returned.
A mere transient ischemic attack
Or a turmeric- yellow Goddess
Extending dominion over disbelief?
29

37. An October morning
The house there wakes up bleary-eyed
Hesitating shadows emerge from its walls-
A varnished gate, the midget of a woman
On the concrete bench, in the garden
Measuring the length of her shadow.
30

38. The destitute children of Mumbai
There ,at the junction , in a sea of cars
Stand these muddy-haired children
They have a nasty habit of poking
Their outstretched grubby hands
Directly into the holes of your eyes.
31

39. The stone-cutter
The man is not worried
About ecology too much
When he breaks stones
From tall mountains
To make comfy houses
For those whose shirts
Smell of currency notes.
His shirt does not smell
He does not have any.
His back has streams
Of glistening sweat
Like mountain streams
Forming giant rivers.
32

40. On visit to Kalady ,the birthplace of Adi Sankaracharya
He seemed to have called us over for lunch
In Kalady’s heat the stomach yearned for it
When we had gone past the river of green
Which had changed the course at his behest
To suit his mother in old age, her water pot.
The river with the crocodile of death in its belly
The crocodile which had set his foot free
On the promise of his forsaking the world.
33

41. Assurance
assurance comes as phone message
from the frosty silence of the nameless
as the mind grapples with questions
that emerge from its dark and dusty attic.
(An assuring phone message from Sai Baba)
34

42. Tribute to the Buddha at the Shanti Stupa in Leh
The hills rose in brown and blue
Fluffy clouds cast shadows on them
And sprinkled powdery evanescent snow
On their reddish-tinged stones.
Deep in the mountains he smiled
Raising his speaking hand for us.
35

43. White memory
White is coarse -spun cloth shirt
And the white of a squint eye
Operating from beyond the world
Two years is long time for an eye- white
Not to merge in the sky’s white.
(Remembering a dear relative who departed two years ago)
36

44. My falling sick
When my mother was not a mere idea
My falling sick was a cosmic event.
Now it is like the forest tree which fell
In the storm, noticed only by the birds
And the big black ants living at the root.
It is now a mere idea ,like my mother,
An idea which comes to its fruition
And fades away in the cosmic sky.
37

45. The death of a leader
He had them coming everywhere;
He promised them rice and jobs.
His words were hopes, sparks
That flew off from under his toes
As he walked their mud tracks.
His eyes now float upwards
On the hill, in the forest
His pockets are full of rain
And the helicopter’s whir.
(The Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Mr.Rajasekhar Reddy has
been killed
in a helicopter crash in the dense forests on his way to a public
meeting)
38

46. The death of a communist
My mind overflows the body
Take my body- I don’t need it-
And my bags in the corner.
Give them to the medical student
And to the Kolkata rag picker.
(On the demise of Mr.Jyoti Basu, the veteran communist at the ripe
age of 96)
39

47. Scatter
This jewel of a girl is not now girl
Because she held the key to jewels.
She needs Vishnu. She is scattered.
(This is about the recent incident of murder of a ten year old girl,
Vaishnavi literally the consort of Vishnu, the chief Hindu God) by her
step-mother’s brothers in the wake of fears of her father
bequeathing all his property to her at the cost of her step-brothers)
40

48. Our beautiful birds are yet to come
The lake promenade is a promise.
It is in their minds and our thought.
Our beautiful birds are yet to come
This winter will be harsh in Siberia
Let us fill blanks with noise and verse.
41

49. Break is not another morning
Break is what touches metal
And nerves and mental state.
Break is sound and disconnect
From life and living and love.
Break is midnight and strange
Huge buses cutting down life.
Break is not another morning.
42

50. Girl in the park
Her fleet-footed long strides
And click-clock of walking shoes
Fill the park’s rhythmic round
Telling an eye story of purpose.
43

51. The box
We make the usual circular motions
Dutifully in our own square boxes.
We look up to see standing people
In balconies of red-and-blue houses
Bursting with morning men and lungis.
They should be back in their box soon.
44

52. The joke
Since nobody laughed at our joke-
A two rupees joke on the cell- phone-
We sat deeply on the foundation,
As our legs dangled in empty space
Through the waving grass of the breeze
Showing bits of sunrise behind the hill.
45

53. Spring
Child of the wind-
Tickle my leaves
And take my laughter
To the distant hills.
46

54. Winter
It is time you slept-
Your eyes have wept
Enough.
47

55. Midnight music
Midnight music is the rising ocean
Called by a reddening of the moon.
Midnight music is the pipal leaves
Playing the wind’s exotic hill music
As its fingers touch their spiked ends.
Midnight music is the invisible cricket
Singing from the silences of the bush.
48

56. Words
Let me say my words
And live life in images
As in deep sleep, so that
I hear the tree falling
In the forest of dream,
And every tree’s falling
In every forest of sky.
49

57. Bodies of consciousness
Opposite are some bodies of consciousness.
Here, on the green park bench, I cogitate
On the fevered awareness of my body.
There, an old body is moving towards me
Pointing other body things to another old body.
Like an old body that whispered, pretty dear,
To the wasp that sat on the window-sill
Still but seemed to be saying something.
50

58. The megalomaniac quiz master
He is quizzing because he is not sure.
He gets into a maze of wordy thoughts
And his words confuse you and him.
They hit you in your solar plexus and his.
Now, now, he wants to saunter leisurely
On the frosty wastes of the snowed hills
As I saunter leisurely now in this night
On the frozen darkness of my years.
51

59. Marriage
There was the girl of the cross-eye
Her long pigtail tucked in blouse.
The nose told stories like eyes.
Her long back arched silently
As she crouched and waited
For history to break and begin
With fresh stories in the making.
52

60. The white tiger of Rewa
This tiger is pale, pearl-white and pure
Its purity shone from its fine taxidermy.
Rewa’s royal pride shines forth indeed
In the stuffed purity of its whiteness.
53

61. Phases
A mere single phase electric line
Makes me much afraid in the dark.
I am in the first phase of my old age
Groping for a matchstick with unsteady hand
In the dark recesses of my mud-wall.
In the quiet afternoon, I sit by myself
Much afraid of the crow’s metallic caw
Marking my life’s phases matter-of-factly.
54