Island

I implore:
Wash me
with the salt of the ocean
wash my wound
of eroded peripheries

I implore:
Drench me
with sweet rain
to contain within
in little puddles
a vision of nectar

I implore:
Hoist flags of torn rags
at my shore
and escape
the horror of listening
to the expanse of your soul

I implore:
Leave
and I will cleanse my shore
of your footsteps
with the salt of the ocean

http://soibamharipriya.blogspot.com ©

Nostalgia

The room
In its sad aura
Looked smaller
Outside the window
the trees didn’t touch the sky
the pukri didn’t overwhelm with its depth

the green tulsi
like an ancestral
taboo
demand attention
of morning and evening scent
and I with my habitual reverence
muttered an ancient chant

the moon appeared still the same
the hunchback moon
the stars still the same
stuck in time
stuck in the expanse
of nothingness

Only the wind whispered
a different tune

http://soibamharipriya.blogspot.com ©

Sky

http://soibamharipriya.blogspot.com ©

Earth

Water

Wind

Belong

You and I
And the burden
of memories
that crept pass by us
silently on soft padded paws
Left us
With a clenched fist
of want and regret

You and I
And the burden
of conspiracies
that life unravels
Silently on yellowed autumn wind
Left us
With an incredulous fable
of friends and foes

You and I
And the burden
of nostalgia
that brings back
moist inhibited kisses
Left us
With sad solitude
of demised love

You and I
And the promise
of dreams
that we carve
from dusk
that fall
in the echoing darkness of a well
In that depth
We sought each other
You and I

You left

I am glad you left
with your brown dreams
of Africa
When the earth
was still brown
in a land
That moulded clay
to give you flesh
That rained
to give you blood
The tears
that was your salt

I am glad you left
with your brown dreams
of Africa
The earth
is now green
I have watered
the gnarled and antique frangipani
It now smiles back at me
with the sun captured in its palm

I am glad you left
with your brown dreams
of Africa
to take your share
and gouge out
eyes and minerals

I am glad you left
And I pray
Please do not return

Why

Why love at all
If you can only love
At uncertain hours
Trying to strech
stolen moments to infinity

Why love at all
If it can only
exist in an axis
of time and space
hoving like an uncertain
leftover moon

Why love at all
If we have to hide
When the night
collapsed into the day
amongst the chaotic cries
of nocturnal insects

Why love
In some tedious rhythm
Fatigued by lies

Why love
against the borrowed rain
and borrowed sun
merging elsewhere
to create a rainbow

Why love
from a distance
like the haunting shadows of rhythm
of a faraway laiharaoba

Why love
If you have to depart
Indifferently
at the end of each day
Against the grainy evening

Apologies

I can no longer provide
the pleasure of plunging
into my soul
and twisting the emptiness within
like strands of solitary entrails

I can no longer
be a vacuum
or a palpable matter
of a strange kind
mutated to accommodate
all that you demand of me

I can no longer
be a sponge
and absorb
blue bruises
and discoloured sperms

The handle is in your grasp
You can still penetrate deeper inside
with your cold steel blades
But my being has overflowed
Oozing out a dark liquid
And I am
As cold as your steel blades

Fragments

In you I see fragments
To write and write again
Lines like the furrows
where farmers plough
To plant seeds of steel
Breaking open your bosom
With spades of iron
To bring forth rains of steel

In you I see fragments
To weep and weep again
To rejoin the weeping river
That resembles a drying drain
Carrying with you the stench of the city
by the grand Bazaar

In you I see fragments
Of hungry souls
Where fire died
from hearths
to kindle in hearts

In you I see
Fragments and only fragments
The whole departed
And so will the fragments