The Cardinal Sings

The Cardinal Sings

By Anant Dhavale

.

Not the free,

Nay the prisoner

The Cardinal sings to 

Wake you up

Wake up!

Not the pious, 

Nay the sinner

Afflictions of sense, 

Calamities of breath – I say,

Leave the shadows, 

The shadows! Beseech the

Light, I say beseech 

The light now!

Not the noble

Nay the murderer

All mornings are

Divine in hindsight and

Religion is blatant

Excuse for war

Go away Tiresias

We know how this ends

(It ends like the 

recrudescence of the last war)

Don’t you get it, it’s

Him–he sings for you,

The Cardinal sings for

You!

Not the jester,

Nay the king.

—-

Nativity

I burn with muted flames

A slow

Change of state

Find me if you can, in this

Heap of things

Once shone bright

I am the lost planet of a

Dead star

No strings of longing

My solace is my

Carnage –

A bloodstorm of desire

Sorrow is not infinite, and

This hour of

Nativity is

Also, the hour of my end.

.

Anant Dhavale

Civilization is a Zero-Sum Game

The Kung San of the Kalahari Desert, The Tuareg people of Algeria, Libya, Niger, and Burkina Faso,

The Berbers of Morocco, The Maasai of East Africa, and The Hadzabe People of Tanzania.

The Copts and Nubians in the Nile Valley. The Maori of New Zealand and the Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia.

The Warlis, the Bhils, the Onge

The Jarawa and the Sentinelese

The Gonds and the Korkus of India.

The Navajos, the Cherokees, the Sioux,

The Ojibwe, the Choctaw, the Apache,

And the Lenapes of the United States. 

People older than the histories of the

Nations

They are now listed under. 

Civilization is a zero-sum game of

Pushing the sons and daughters of the

Soil to the brink of extinction.

.

Anant Dhavale

A Koyal Sings Amid War

Do not blame them if they speak Each other's language

Or drink from

Common rivers

Or the fact that they can reminisce their

Systematically robbed pasts in

Mostly unintelligent, yet

Somehow touching

Songy-dancy costume

Dramas.

A shared hodgepodge of

Emotional clusterfuck. 

And don't be surprised if they’re awfully close to each other

A kite flown high enough in

Amritsar could easily be spotted from

Lahore

If sufficiently colored with dyes made from Henna,

Mustard, and

Saffron

It is high summer in

India and in Pakistan

A season for

Mangoes and cool evening breezes

The otherwise outliers on the

Edges of hellish hot noons

A Koyal’s Mellifluous call is heard

He refuses to be suppressed by the

Roar of expensive war planes 

Middle-aged men and women suffer meltdowns 

On national television 

Froth billows at their hard-lined mouths 

Convulsive paroxysms of misplaced pride

A meadow is crimsoned

And villages are destroyed 

The Himalayas shudder with the 

Bright-burning, loud war birds flying amok

Chests are thumped loudly on both sides

Haphazard claims of victories made

A slow poison 

Crawls its way into billions of hearts

Displacing hopes of a meaningful co-existence

How’d we get here — what happened to all those

Loving, affable people otherwise used to 

Exchanging cringy Bollywood songs 

And Meaningful Ghazals

I am tired of the

Barrage of misinformation

Blasts on my phone

My hairline keeps receding 

And the world keeps going to shit

Every hour, every day.

__

Anant Dhavale

Koyal - Cuckoo

This

It is this unconcerned                                 chasm that widens

It is for this I write, the

Disguised fierceness   

                                     rushing, now and again,

What lament could justify the                     divide, the 

Coarse-lewd rhetoric, the 

Animosity.

My declamations – quotidian sighs; they 

Don’t necessitate any crises of moral 

Proportions;                                               

                No froth of curiosity. Agitation, a painful distraction.

What maddens us quietly also makes us 

                                                   Question the 

                                                    Beliefs that govern our decades. 

..

Anant Dhavale

1

Waking is dreaming 

In sleep— a new world of

Color returning to cheeks, of

Meanings rediscovered 

Waking is also walking 

Past known and unknown faces

On a long haul train of time

Zooming through desert

The coal runs low and a 

Fear of getting stranded midway

Looms large. 

..

Anant Dhavale

A ghazal

Well who would you blame 

When rigged is this game 

All of us are brutes 

And no one to tame

You call them the thugs

In parts you’re the same

When questions get tough 

Say what’s in the name

The rest were all gone

I muted the flame

.

Anant Dhavale

Speak

We speak like
                Protagonists from
Existential novels, in 
Long-winded laments of
Self-exploratory 
Monologues 
Never letting our
Guards down

We speak out of some

Urgent newfound

Necessity 

This nascent happenstance of some

Sexual- spiritual upheaval

That cannot be contained

We speak in a language of

Low-tide sandlings

Eager for some orgasmic

                   Eruption of the 

Illusive inner world.

We speak, fully knowing

Words are energy that

Cannot be redeemed

..

Anant Dhavale

Waking

woke up in a dream wondering if this is real or that which passed

..

Anant Dhavale

Autumn Buddha

Your radiance would have swayed me
Another day, another time

But today
I am content 
Watching leaves fall
From a distance

Orange, red, brown
Colors of an autumn Buddha.

—

Anant Dhavale

Haiku - recent / random

I would've bought your book
but it was a hot New York evening
and I needed more beer

..

monday night 

in the loneliness tavern

poets drink to sadness

..

coastal town

the sun, frozen 

in a haze of time

..

a bird, perched up high

in a tree — feels the truth

it cannot explain 

..

your evocative eyes

let me know when 

to stop talking 

..

cloudy morning 

something flaps in the wind

a subdued beginning 

..

this one goes up-town

with a hub-bub of people

and their belongings 

..

a primal train scream

shards strewn astray

summer, in its full glory 

..

patter of raindrops 

like a stranger’s knock 

click clickety click

..

rainy morning wraps

the metropolis in a mist

of being and nothingness 

..

spring falters 

on the banks of 

returning cold

..

blue blue blue

a certain cold hue

my eyes won’t discern 

..

beautiful girl 

in a sub-urban metro

a dance of light and shadows 

..

sub-urban night 

slow jazz of stars

sky, a purple unfazed 

..

soft sounds of rain

a quiet evening

sleep — a distant corridor 

..

driving in rain

on quiet long nights 

the blue hum of time

..

imagination is 

a boat — weather torn

forlorn

..

soon we will forget 

the blizzards, the frost

such flows time

..

and there I see her

like a ray of sunshine

a soothing breeze 

..

a relic from the past

waiting for the thaw 

the lost code of an age

..

cold cold nights 

amber hazy skies

myths re-spoke 

..

Anant Dhavale

( These, like most poems here are raw and in the making. I edit and re-edit poems before they get published anywhere.)

Gipsy

I'd say I knew

Better - spiritually speaking

As a younger person

What happened?

Earth caved in –

Too many aspirations? 
  
And I say ambition 

Isn’t wrong
But know if it’s for you 
 

Sooner or later 
The vagabond Gipsy
Will admonish

In too deep –

This involved?

But here’s the thing 
Nothing and no one 

Can solve the puzzle

Not a careless screw-up
Not a person of the world

  

*

 

Anant Dhavale

Rhythm

 WIP - Part of a long poem

Rhythm: Tap, Cling, Tap, Tap, Lapse.

The empty vase lacked the glory of voluminous red roses – so they filled it up, with a dozen

of red. In Eastern cultures, similar large jars are used for pickled fruits. Bright and brown, almost olive, fruit preserved in natural oils. Time attached to things and Places. Food, flowers. Culture travels through your feet, the journey you make. Eliot’s magi Were pilgrims. Every breath is a pilgrimage, reverential, feared too. Pour some water into your vases so the flowers won’t wither away, use the flower food that came with the dozen. Dozen – one of those words with a feeling, a brazen sonorous hum. Nature to hand-made, akin to the flow of time. Sheepish wind can bring stranger aromas, relinquished languages, and grained stances, in a way meddling.  If those ignorant feet stepped into puddles – there would be splashes, sounds, and stains - by-products of journeys. Flowers become proclivities turned into meditations of loss and learning, some bespoke knowledge wide open for interpretations. Awareness a burden, for heaving chests.

Rhythm: Lapse, Tap, Cling, Tap, Tap.

An inconsequential post-rain night, the neighborhood gone quiet, no droning of fans, no music from televisions. Radios gone quiet for the night. Crickets – incessant sounds, swelling up to the blue, dark blue, bluer expanse. Almost eight and forty, but a memory like some vain lunacy refuses to die. Eight and forty, but the number is a made-up notion. The blind won’t go all the way down, an opportunistic light peers through frosty glass. Her ways are brisk, but strangely her smile idles on my mind in a luscious way, those hazel green eyes with all the power to fetch in arousal – not absolute but a distinct possibility. Bereft of senses, pushing aside the sane – the right thing to do. More far than close, as abstract as it could be. Who is to say -- that finding something at random is foretellable?

Rhythm: Lapse, Tap, Cling, Cling, Cling, Cling, Tap.

The sense of failing underwrites sermons of loss and findings. A fantastical tale of molecules, the energy an unwavering constant. 

Anant Dhavale

Let

Let then proclivities rule the day
Till shadows hit the waters

And winds change in ways
Unmeasured and abrupt 

This cumbersome-ness of breath etched 
upon windowpanes 
deepens by the coolness of air 
a burden far too great 
to carry all along

Seasons hunt for inlets

a nonchalant flood 

a disproportionate rushing-in 

dimness, perfunctory

assays of molten
thought and desire 

run heavy on days

and years and months

How then to refuse the little 
respites of exultation 

bubbling in the rivulets

of life.

..

Anant Dhavale

( Heavily edited version)

Forgotten loves

Forgotten loves- 
An aging mother 
A father long lost.

Forgotten loves -
Sweet childhood days
The smell of fresh blossoms 

Forgotten loves-
Simpler joys
A little less convoluted 
World.

Forgotten loves - 
A contented heart 
A careless laugh 
A merry hop in the wind.
.
Anant Dhavale

Relinquishing - En Masse

The train stands still 
As if it doesn't want to move

Dust-laden tracks 

lack empathy

by design

But people are either stoic
or they've given up,
on a large number of things

Themselves, society, governments
things a watcher cannot discern

 

A lack of will omnivailes

Hiding truths that matter, histories 
accumulated on their own

A mist of hopelessness floats
around the monoliths, fallusing up 
from the barren, sun-burned ground

Bared by the feet of millions, 

the unknown builders of  
magnificent tombs 

their hands calloused from the harshness 

of circumstance 

An act of relinquishing happens en masse 
a collective unhappiness is embraced

I could have called it ignorance 

had I been haughty and judgmental

and not a wayward rivulet of the same

great river

This ever-present need to not know —
this flat-out refusal to question things

But now, in this
solipsistical rant

I am trying to emulate the stoicity 
of generations, to
explore its roots in the fickle strands of protein

We fondly term DNAs.

-

Anant Dhavale

Let

 Let then proclivities rule the day

Till the shadows hit the waters

And winds change in ways

Unmeasured and abrupt 

This cumbersome-ness of breath, etched 

Upon windowpanes 

Aggravated by the coolness of air 

Is a burden far too great 

To carry all the way

Seasons will hunt for inlets

To get inside our heads

Flooding fragile senses 

With a perfunctory dimness

Of thought and desire 

How then will we refuse ourselves the little 

Respites of exultation along the waves of 

Life, rushing through the rivulets of time.

..

Anant Dhavale

Nehru’s ghost

It lurks - in the corridors of schools and colleges 
In the yellowing pages of history books.

Its presence can be felt in the brand new swanky
buildings of the Sansad Bhavan.

It bothers people, reminding them of their 
constitutional duties, and the set of behaviors that keep sense and sensibility alive.

It crouches on steely chests of proud
politicians and rulers.

It is said that Lincoln’s ghost haunts the white house - possibly to warn people of the dangers that come from mobocracy. 
We can say the same of Nehru’s ghost.

It lingers and hovers around the hallowed halls of
India’s democracy, maybe like a guardian angel - 
or an angry spirit.

But who is to say? 
. 

Anant Dhavale

One

hardboiled eggs
unsweetened black tea
morn-time shenanigans 
.

Anant Dhavale 

Wordshed NYC poetry reading event.

I am one of the featured readers at the Wordshed poetry reading in Bowery (lower Manhattan) this month. I might read some of my newer stuff, let's see.

Haiku

in a surreal world 
dance is a state of mind 
a phase of being

.

Anant Dhavale

Icy

your icy demeanor
reminds me of a cloud
dying to burst open 

#

Anant Dhavale

Ode to humanity and William Carlos Williams

The coffee has gone cold

I can nuke it if you want 

she says it's alright

so I turn to my phone again

the news streams keep getting worse

and I am a little dazed this morning

from yesterday's beer

it was a European brew 

a little bitter 

the ones that come in green bottles

with edged crowns 

and lesser-known names.

 

It’s a muggy day

and humanity is almost on the cusp of a total meltdown

so we get on with the hours

like William Carlos Williams 

would have, 

through the narrow streets of Rutherford, New Jersey

after a home visit to an ailing child.

 

Anant Dhavale

( From "What the Tornado Left Behind.)