Of Spring and Hope

(Wote this poem many years ago, and I have kept editing it since. )

Wheelchair tucked into the table

she can hardly breathe, and yet
he tries to feed her smaller morsels

God knows how many jobs
she had worked
to feed him

Her head wobbles every so often
and the tissues keep falling off

He slowly tucks them back

She can hardly eat

all she wants is to spend some time
with her boy
before it all comes
crumbling down

He holds a glass of water.
she sips a drop or two
and shakes her head
the effort
takes a toll on her weary life

The day is dying bit by bit and
the sky is probably crimson red outside

Spring is slowly making its way,
they say it brings hope and life for the 
new and the old

Days dissolve into dusk
nights roll into dawns;
the coherence
simple and easy, caring
like doting mothers
and loving sons

The tissues keep falling off, 
and God knows why but
I got tears in my eyes

 
--
Anant Dhavale
Copyright © Anant Dhavale

A poem

Lazy saturday evening in an English pub
Reckless and young
She looks beautiful
In a denim jacket
A girl one can fall for
You go to the uni or something?
I ask her
I have a baby, she replies a smile
Give the lady whatever she wants 
I say to the barkeep

--
Anant Dhavale
@Anant Dhavale

Commotion

Commotion

---

Foretell
What the night holds
Long waits, shimmers of joy
Besieging journeys or
Death

I better part of me always knew it
And probably you did too
A thing understood
Never told, never heard

They say
The worlds sprouted from a word
The word itself
Doesn't matter
Nevertheless

Un-catalogued,
We’ve lived umpteen lives
Each ending in dregs
Scattered far and few

Commotion, chaos
is it you?
Or have I finally stepped out of my solitude?

--

Anant Dhavale

Copyright @ Anant Dhavale

Un poème triste

Un poème triste

---
There's so much of noise here
Take me out, will you?
I cant think in here
Cant breathe

And so we leave for a walk
There is a man muttering something
Around the corner
I often see him there
May be he speaks with god

Hold my arm, would you?
Walk me through the isles
And so we walk
Its an awfully quite evening

There's a bunch of kids playing in the distance - Few old people talking in muffled voices, You cant really listen to what they are saying; Silhouettes of trees against the fading sky, slowly moving to a gloomy wind

Its a dead little town
Lets get out of here
The old buildings seem to have gotten very old
In the evening glow
Its crumbling;
Melting drop by drop to a slow, agonizing death
But, you see, you cannot really go afar
Things always pull you back
Friends
Lovers
Even old streets and boulevards

And so the evening grows on us
Awfully quietly;
Let us go home
Its getting cold
The children in the distance
The old men in the park
Must have reached home by now;
You see,  not a lot of people like to walk alone
On such melancholy evenings
Muttering all alone
As if they were talking to the god
--
Anant Dhavale
Copyright @ Anant Dhavale 2015

On understanding and other such myths

On understanding and other such myths'

1.

There is a void

I try to fill

it's impenetrable

I toil nonetheless

 

I attach it to people and things

equally in-vain

 

it is my Nessun dorma

a sleepless lament

 

logic has failed me 

and religions have mislead me

mostly

 

I look at the old people

they look so calm

beyond the fading lines

Maybe they weren't what they are now.

 2.

There's fire and moon

from where it all began

to create the un-made

to annihilate the created

create

a voice said

and it all came to being

 

Reminiscences

linger

mountains, rivers, oceans

people

 

3.

 Mithyaa

you see all of this,

you, me, this world

is a magnificent lie

said the poet

before he was pelted with stones

Smallest amongst the atoms*

Expansive than the sky;

some said he disappeared

some said he was dragged from a bridge

before being killed

 

Gods, they said, came down and took him along

unto the heavens

we believed them.

  4.

 The layer thickens

the songs we sing

the love we make

the sadness we feel

The pain that’s throbbing in my knee right now

 

All beyond a broken veil, the discernment

a mere illusion

brilliantly

ornate

 ***

Anant Dhavale

Copyright@ Anant Dhavale

 

--

* These two lines are a loose translation of a poem by Tukaram, a sixteenth-century Marathi poet.

A mid noon visit to the Westminster Cathedral

It was an overcast noon

At the Westminster

as the

Children in the choir sang

A long, lonely hymn

That made me cry

A thousand rivers

 

I lit up a candle

And sat there in a complete melancholy

That'd gripped me

In the mountains of western ghats

And

On the banks of Godavari 

Lost

forlorn

And somber

 

Now

I am not a Christian 

Nor am I a Hindu

But I prayed

To what’s beyond the curtain

 

And if someone had asked me

'What were they singing?'

Only the angels know

I would have said. 

--

Anant Dhavale

Copyright @ Anant Dhavale

A million years

A million years

On whose shoulders perches the Eagle?
Who mourns through gusts of the eastern rushing winds?
A boy who grew up in dullness couldn't get out of it for the rest of his life
he felt gloomy on all evenings and smiled at the slightest of the raindrops
he saw the decades descend on the great delta and thought he would have a rising too;
the one that would pull him out of the clutches of nights and days
Grief is borne out of grief, he would think, and nothing else happens

So it was the rising that never came, and grief only paved the way for further grief
The valley surged with new delights
newer brigades took over the streets and the palaces
he scribbled, and he kept scribbling
to the rise of the valley and the tedium of his own
Everything will pass, he wrote; nothing will remain,
the tree that gave you the shelter
the you that took the shelter
the shelter that gave 
and the act of taking
There isn't a conundrum bigger than a symbol staring at you meaninglessly
No sadness is greater than what dwells in your heart
you are the life
In you lies the end

He walked along the shores with a peasant's feet
with a smell of the soil in his soul harvested by generations
toiling and dying in the fields
his hands carried the language of harvests
through his eyes flew the monsoons
the dreary summers
and the long hopeless waits
scattered along the earthen roofs
along the weary shadows of Neem

We were no warriors
our king taught us to fight
and so we fight
with our enemies
with our lives and our times
we plow through the fields and raise harvests of gold

He walked by the cities that rose to the skies
with a demeanor that mocked him
ridiculed him
and even threatened him
these glittering settlements of hollow people; with billows of wealth rising from its trenches
It's blue, sky-high sepulchers
shone deep into the pupils of his eyes
blinding him
pushing him back
mauling him, crushing him to death

This isn't the place for me; he thought  I belong to
the fields and the hills
and the river that flows through my heart
I walk down the road that passes through the planes
and the faraway lands
where truth lays scattered in feathers
of slain birds; of drained seas
 I walk into the cold
in to the dark grey blossoms;
the sounds sublime

 Who am I, my beloved? He asked
 to the skies, to the waters, to the winds
 Where am I headed?
 Decades have gone by, and he hasn't reached anywhere
 and the Godavari, she has flown past another million years.

--

Anant Dhavale

Copyright@ Anant Dhavale
Anantdhavale@gmail.com

First Published in the Open Road Review.