Divine Worth

If you think I am having more fun
Than anyone on this planet
You are absolutely correct.
-I Hold The Lion's Paw, Hafiz

Still The Same

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
-Ash Wednesday, TS Eliot

Please Return

The others told her she was stupid. So she made
herself stupid in order not to see how stupid
they were to think she was stupid,
because it was bad to think they were stupid.
-Knots, RD Laing

Wheat Grain

The light you give off
did not come from a pelvis.

Your features did not begin in semen.
Don't try to hide inside anger
radinace that cannot be hidden.
-Rumi

Working Day

In the easternmost part of India,
In verdurous Bengal, I sit.
Here too the poet Jayadeva watched on a rainy day
The blue-green shadows of distant tamal-trees,
The density of a sky in full cloud.
-The Meghaduta, Rabindranath Tagore

Verbal Alchemy

When she gets down from the rickshaw
you hear a clatter of windows
opening from houses across the street.
- Of Interiors, Kekin N. Daruwalla

Phantom World

The scent of the rose stole out, and the garden's secret is betrayed:
What calamity! a flower itself should the traitor's role have played.
- Shikwa and Jawab-i-Shikwa, Muhammad Iqbal

Where To?

And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come -
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.
- The Wheel, Yeats

Risk Profile

A tiny shred
of yours and mine
clinging within my flesh
- Pregnant, Surjeet Kalsey

Rebel Angels

As when the Sun new ris'n
Looks through the Horizontal misty Air
Shorn of his beams, or from behind the Moon
In dim Eclipse...
- Paradise Lost, Milton

Composed Moments

The flame of hope or the flame of hate,
Quick flame of my heart's desire?
-In Praise of Gulmohur Blossoms, Sarojini Naidu

Breaking Verse

Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;
- Once it was the colour of saying, Dylan Thomas

Rudely Awakened

The hearts of women throb with deep yearning
watching mango trees swaying in the breeze
with low-hanging sprigs of coppery-red shoots,
and branches showing off their blossoming loveliness.
- Spring, Ritusamhara. Kalidasa

Strung Prose

Somedays the sight of her slender naked body startled her. She was a mere child!
- Burial at Sea, Khushwant Singh

Enlightened

"When you're ready to sell your diamonds
it's time to go to Empire State Building"
and jump into the 30s like they did in 1929.
- Commercial Variations, Frank O'Hara

From Different Worlds

As drinking brackish water
makes one thirstier,
the more I look on my lover
the greater my longing
to keep on gazing.
-Satsai, Bihari

Titled One

Someone is putting a needle through the horizon,
Threading it with the golden string of a sunken sun.
- Their World, Tabish Khair

Untitled 01