psalms keep ringing in the valley / we climb up the stairs to hell / treetops glinting green are too high to offer shelter / clouds hold pitifully their empty bladders / the land has conceived from their night discharge / scattered pieces of silence catch us unawares / time dangles at the edges of mechanics / aloud from the valley the river calls / at coffee house poets brood over their ruined harvest of poems / discuss why this year it snowed so late / the sky breaks into luminous orange streaks / night falls quietly like fresh snowflakes

umbra

grandfather sits on the edge of sleep / lingering bits of day dig into his heart / with all the strength he can gather he shakes me up / wake up he says there’s a windmill around here / le’me sleep i yell only god / could afford cutting the jungle to set up one / why don’t you put on your hearing aid / god needs not a windmill at this lonely place

at the breakfast table he looks straight in my face / eighty years are enough to tell reality from space / you’ll understand it all when you are my age

his face seems like a giant banyan to me

eighty wrinkles in all he has on his skin

penumbra

tempting posters clutter the city walls / veeru and i bunk out to see tamil tits / they are shooting for a new film on the ridge* these days / tents and sets everywhere we can’t identify the place / the crewmen won’t let us pass / we take the longer route round the mass

how easy it is to be a filmstar
                                              veeru says
i guess so
               i reply

and the most taxing of all to be students
                         fighting babar and pythagoras each day

no!
     i shoot back firmly
                                   worse is being pelted by silence

his eyes widen in surprise

leave it aside
                    i say
                           i forgot just twelve we are!

* The ridge is a major tourist spot of Simla, where Hindi films are often shot

(First published in The Journal of the Poetry Society (India), Vol. 12, No. 1, Summer 2001)
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