Contemporaneity

In another land as I write

there’s an explosion and a scream

there’s a quite sob and grief-weary eyes

that just cannot in tear find release

there’s horror that cannot congeal into scream

funerals and burials;

right now, as I write 

it’s early evening in certain cities

and late night in others

there’s love-making and festivity

babies are being born 

death by natural causes recorded;

right now, as I write

there’s life and death

encased in the eternal verities 

the ata lo dahama 

acknowledged or not;

right now, as I write

there’s a heartbeat 

in primordial irregularity 

saying ‘write, write

for death must come

and you don’t know when’;

right now, as I write

there’s a ticking in my heart

a time-bomb it is

that the world calls ‘love’.

Ode to Sleep

When you fall asleep

it is I who dreams 

suspended in vacancy

watching things that wander

unmoored from gravity

beds and bedrooms

libraries and brooms

names untagged from things

all of which will come down

and return to identities

when you awake

Teas

Mid-morning tea is not morning tea

one is for throat-wetting 

and the other a pick-me-up

of a flagging day

but then there are other hot drinks

laced with words picked 

from conversations 

from touch and memory

a smile, a laugh, silence and a kiss;

there's tea in give and tea in receiving

and I don't know what lifts more

The virtues of unemployment

like an ethereal scavenger sweeping
over the litter that collects in tiny piles
on the architecture of the political
those made-up faces and faces that are beyond repair;
I see the epic narratives missed by literatures
in a scar, in the plain tea quick-fix
the marshmellows and poisons
the varnishing that makes palatable
ineffective and yet bitter medicines
prescribed by these quack doctored times;
I stand at a window without a frame
by a petti kade too humble for name
but which is sentinel to monotonies unnoticed
same faces at the same time
same voices asking for the same things
same greetings, same smiles and same conversations
layered over the unspeakable
in the courtesies that say nothing
but are warm nevertheless and true as well
kohomada? vahiy da? Ennam....
'We are one,' I tell myself
'We are solitary people,' I also add,
take a breath and think of you.
Life is good.

A love note from Galle

Forbidding walls speak of pride and fear

rooftops cascade into languid courtyards

where conversation shards are gathered

by ghosts with amputated voices

artisans with the full weight of their humility

in soft voice dignity detail the timber and pigment 

of lifetime and moment

the tinkle of cutlery and crockery 

drains out of elegant eateries 

tiptoe away along shocked cobbled stones 

frozen with noonday heat

and the slow step of a passerby

bypassing the narratives of the forgotten;

the afternoon is sliced with lime-fragrance

love climbs improbably ladders

only to be consumed by insatiable reptiles;

there are words and there is silence

the unplanned pregnancies of our ignorance

complement the curves of propriety;

I take it all in and breathe it all out

swallow words as voice tapers off 

as moment defers to reflection;

you crash unwittingly through 

debris and fairytales,

stand before me and in a matron's voice 

object and deny in practiced firmness

and then, as though to alleviate sorrows imagined,

smile and indulge in the play of fingers --

those distant relatives of a heart

by decree of reason, jailed. 

Love and patience

The one and the same

it is not a country

that to the impatient

offers citizenship, no

love is as close as faraway

as immediate as never 

but alas!

in ignorance 

laced with conviction

which in turn with doubt is soaked

we write lexicons:

love is such and such

so too patience: such and such;

and open out hearts to bliss

and to insanity our minds.

Snakes and Ladders

A favorite game 

came through poetry and innocence

was companion to movie dates

that sudden shower 

reminding us that droughts do end;

it was silent witness to silences

this game that's so ancient 

that we forget easily

it never was meant to end

so we can move through encumbrance 

chase and flee

and through it all

at improbable intersections

arrive.