By: Preeth Ganapathy

On stillness

In the morning,
The stillness
descends easy.
As I sit by,
The side of
The placid
Lake waters
Observing the dew flecked petals
Of the red Gulmohar flower
And ride gently on the
Vagabond
White clouds
The milieu of work returns in the hot afternoon
The rudderless clouds
Stutter and splutter
As they come up against
The fiery Sun and melt
Away.
The stillness,
Unsupported,
Cannot be immured.
It flies
Away.
No simulacra can take its place.
I search land and sea,
travel the unpeopled streets of the city,
implore the snoring dogs,
leaf through the pages of my poetry book,
turn over the beauty of the words in my mind,
Looking for clues.
But they are as stoic as ever.
At dawn, the next day,
I spritz the Gulmohar flowers with water
pray by the side of the placid lake
beseech the vagabond clouds
The stillness, wordlessly returns.

###

For K

The mosaic of memories
Ensconced in the remote crevices of the cerebellum,
The train of thoughts chugging, halting
When I’m in a meeting, waiting to speak,
The miasma of anger
Lurking in the heart,
The flutter of desire like the serrated edges
Of a leaf in the garden,
The congruence of –
The acquiescence of a failure
With soaring success,
The tall skied summer days
With the winter hours
The bad hair days,
The fear of ferocious street side hounds,
And the pain of a writer’s block –
Are all privy to You.
Yet You stand in a tribhangi
With a flute on Your lips and an effervescent smile
That radiates from Your eyes
Silently
In a corner
Glowing in the incandescence
Of the crimson lamp
With the quiet knowledge that –
This vision immured in the mind’s eye
Is inspiration enough
To embrace the phantasmagoria of future