Hijrat

Vision suffers
A burning light
Pierces through an unfamiliar sky

Earth - the ever known
Never understood
Freedom to walk, a terrifying
Door to the unknown

Banal crossings : Peek out the womb
Or close the wandering eye 

A bird traverses seas
Schools of fish move with
Motion color uncertainty

Beyond, a knowing
A Silhouette of ways

Displaced, the droplets form again
Make me whole. 

.Anant Dhavale

Drab

These days I mostly 

Read, then I read some more.

The warm glow of the

Tablet, shimmering in the dull-luster glow of

Long-form literary journalism — 

Too intoxicating to ignore 

The article always starts with how the 

Author met with protagonist 

On a humid afternoon 

Or morning 

Before detailing out other mundane 

Things

How the con unfurled or how the mountain

Killed the half of them

It is essentially a drab thing to do

Say slightly better than doom-scrolling

Or reading some abstruse French theorist 

Or even wondering about your 

Conniving thuggish relatives 

Then at the end, the deal gets sweetened  with

Another enticing read

Privilege, racism, narcotics, AI

Whimsical writers and their equally insane

Editing counterparts 

No dearth of fodder in this big bad

Beautiful world of ours 

The gullible consumer inside of me

Is an easy prey 

Even for the otherwise docile 

Literary journalists. 

. Anant 

Yakṣa's tale

Quit drifting 
It is broad day-light after all

The Yakṣa who spun this daydream
For idle merriment
Put enough desire and pain and suffering in there
To make it palpable

Wake up
The day moves with the
fierceness of an unknown mason's
Clang

Hordes of ambition maraud the streets

Go join them.

.Anant Dhavale

Nothing's beyond reckoning —that 

dissolution of the self does not happen, dang

it does not matter much in reality

And though reality is relative, what with the passage of time

and lives in a continual transition

Pain is real, so are smiles and breezy mornings

Nothing relative there

When soul-crushing things happen, and there is

an ache difficult to set aside, the questions of 

existence become moot

People have still strived to find scraps of meaning

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Raw stuff

Come walk with me
We will talk about things and laugh
At our frailties 

And the banal intricacies of this world

Love Stays
Beyond questions and dilemmas 

When we smile and eat and drink
Together 

Life seems ok
And things are alright. 

2

I leave but I do not reach
More of a drifter

I walk with the bird’s intent
And the need to return 

Every man needs to return
Home
An odyssey undefined

So I walk
But I don’t reach

So I walk with the emptiness of
Oceans 

And I walk
And I walk

Beguiled the universe floats
Around me 

It’s a gossamer I have weaved
A tale I have spun

Let me color the tale
With my moments 

So I walk
So I drift

Evenings anchored in my
Lungs
A melancholy on my
Hands

It’s the rain of an individual
Apocalypse 

An individual
End of time

Passage

In the air a sadness
Looms large

I haven’t been the poet that I am 

This monsoon is different
A reminder of
Another time
Another life

I have changed
With the universe
Around me

Mountains and valleys
Of my days
A quiet passage
Through my time

We live in our time
In our hearts, in our life

And time flows by
Like it never knew

Like it never knew

-Anant

Mayflower

A gossamer-thin ocean hits low notes today.

Only the lower ones; the hapless sullen lover,

The nonchalant up above couldn’t care less. 

 

Wind bleats, boat creaks, pet dogs merry-hop

In the sea-wind. Voices rise and fall with the waves.

These shores, they say, have seen the Mayflower.

Countless others have sunk to the bottom,

A slow dissolution of collective merciful being.

People of the first light walked here; These waters 

Are the finest monuments. Revered flotsam of undaunted lives.

Lighthouses, moved and freshly painted, still carry the

Dim fragments of light; strewn from the blue hollow.

The biggest moon of the year's impending, we must head back 

Soon. Quietly, we exchange smiles like vows. 

Sense drowns deep in me or perhaps it’s the nip of the wind.

Like a fool I toss away my shoes and walk 

Barefoot on the beach, soft sand and silken touch and all. 

Anant Dhavale

( Edited significantly from the previous draft.)

Things

Hands warmth hugs kisses
being near being one

journeys long afar brows
the heaviness ajar 

time ripens fast slow
songs jade stale

discordance thought
memory deep trench years

flaps wings the gallop
the heart the stories the 

solitude in-between. 

- Anant Dhavale

( The conjunctions/ prepositions were blocking the flow 

so I got rid of them. This note too was unnecessary, 

but there is too much real estate on the page. )

Kanher

No recompense for the thousand shards of self

Buzzards one and two, high they used to fly. I noticed them
Frequently on my long wind-bitter winter walks
A whimsy with its own color and smell

I did not see them along the decaying heights of New York
None. Drifters, yes, hordes of them, fellows 

Stranded on the artistic bends. Quiet
And turbulent souls on late-night homeward trains

No respite from living, from breathing the continuum
Veins are freed from the weather’s wrath; but storms?

Always always on the way back, a clockwork of the absurd —
The Kanher loses a shade of red each summer with me

This evening could almost kill me and yet.
 

--

Anant Dhavale

(Kanher : Nerium Oleander)

Mayflower

A gossamer thin ocean hits low notes today 

Only the lower ones, the hapless sullen lover

The nonchalant up - above couldn’t care less 

Wind bleats, boat creaks, pet dogs merry-hop in the sea-wind

These shores they say have seen the Mayflower

And yet, several hundred others sunk to the merciful bottom

Going down is hard albeit low effort

People of the first light walked here; waters are the finest monuments

To have seen it all. Flotsam of undaunted lives

Lighthouses, moved and freshly painted still can't shake off 

Dim fragments of light swept in from the depths of turbulent nights

The biggest moon of the year's impending, we must head back 

Soon. Quietly we exchange smiles like vows. 

Sense drowns deep in me or perhaps it’s the nip of the wind

Like a fool I toss away my shoes and walk 

Barefoot on the beach, soft sand and silken touch and all. 

.Anant

Notional Pie

a kiss

missed

is akin to 

the notional pie

you would want to

but couldn't

consume.

-Anant

Mir's Poems

back then

when we were 

obsessed with 

poems of Mir

a cloud of melancholy

would shroud 

us in

the sadness, inexplicable

yet beautiful in

some bygone way

and how we sat through the

hours

and how the hours 

lingered for us

with us

much like they did in

Mir's poems.

-Anant

quest

another quest

another day

a loner path

waives away

history drools

by awkward shrubs

huddled together, in

the desert's way

-Anant

attainable

trudge the muddy waters

of circumstance

in search of 

obscure individual

glories

some un-realized splendor

a certain summit

shines in the 

distance

always visible, yet

never attainable. 

- Anant

lethargia

lethargia

some the rain

ushered in

some the

existential

boredom

a lulled knock

on the windowpane.

-Anant

Meanings

minuscule drops
of water
as old as time
itself

in them, I find
meanings, new and

never occurred.

.Anant

Notional Pie

a kiss missed
is akin to 

the notional pie
you would want to

but you could not
consume.

.Anant 

Poem

the dark
it sifts down the 

Chimney

the invisible
unavoidable void

claws at you

you nod
and walk on.

..Anant Dhavale

#vss365

Flow

nostalgia is ache
a prison of the mind

we are hard-wired to be
miserable

through our knowing

the ancients knew it, and offered
symbols into the flowing river

to let go of what
we carry; 

what we perceive to be our
ultimate reality.

.Anant Dhavale

#vss365