Writing a Love Poem
Come, make the world mean with yourself
come, let me fill you up with
all that’s mine
— Paul Celan
I will write a love poem tonight
to plant a garden where you can arrive
at break of day, dip your misgivings in rose-caressed light
and gather like honey the leafy chirrups of birds
carrying the promise of faith
from tree to tree.
I will write a love poem tonight
to show you it is possible
to weave communities across continents
the way stars wed skies with their seamless rings,
meteors falling like kisses
from their lips.
I will write a love poem tonight
to bring to you the promise of sleep
as it falls wave upon wave under your eyes,
as dreams tug you towards the tide
and shadows slip from your shoulders
in the dark.
I will write a love poem tonight
to tell you how a question is an answer
and a silence a book you can read over and over again,
its pages leading you each time to a new truth
as a melody often leads us to a part of the heart
unvisited for long.
I will write a love poem tonight
to ask you to walk through tight corridors
before you reach a valley of light,
its edges rimmed with gold, its splendour so untold
it is as if you never saw the rainbow
reflected in a stream before.
I will write a love poem tonight
to remind you how after everything is lost,
something remains in the heart's tiny cradle
immune to death the way the sea still whispers
in the speck-like heart of a shell
exiled upon desert sands.
I will write a love poem tonight
to assure you that love grows in you like a tree,
its roots holding tight your life’s soil
while your desires aloft on its branches
are promises the earth makes to the sky
each time they hold hands in the rain.
A Manual for Pain
Of the many pains in the world I would never
wish you, friend,
is this tethering of a distraught heart
to love's last bend,
and this waiting ceaselessly
without end.
***
The dusk-lit hours arrive each day on time
but now that you are gone, they are far too many.
In the helix of innocence, one whole point is missing.
Not knowing how to confront it, I avoid the evening.
It senses that my silence is fingerprinted by a storm.
The heart is all ocean. I am desperately looking for land.
Once this storm spends itself will be found somewhere
a pin-head of land that I must patiently roll out into a country.
It will take years but what growth does not?
The gestation being all one has, it were best not asked — how long.
***
The point is to arrive at the point
where I grudge no one anything,
to go sans expectation, sans claim,
respecting all that life brings
and to learn the language of gratitude
so as to welcome all that comes.
***
At this point, the point is to stand up
and walk across the full length of this room
without thinking for a moment
of what did not come.
This is the most challenging test.
If one has done this,
one will soon learn how to live.
Farewell Note for an Ex
The world’s end, when it’s predicted,
hardly ever comes.
For it's in the nature of beginnings and ends
to come as surprises,
quietly, and without fanfare.
An infrequent Calphurnia
may stumble upon a dream.
But for most of us who sleep soundly,
our faith in tomorrow as given
as that in our nails,
the end is a sham.
No oracles, no signs, no portents.
Just a sudden betrayal
like the signal of a radio station
breaking off on the highway.
You have faith in an afterword,
refuse to believe that this is it,
try to think of goosebumps
as a shock of language.
Nothing changes by your faith.
In time, when you look back
and see it the way it was,
the conclusion seems appropriate.
Later, when the end, inconsistent,
threatens to dissolve into beginning again,
you have the maturity to realize you are
bloody sick of the acrobatics of language
and the only word you can have
any respect for, now, is 'bye' —
a sound that waves even as it stands still
and promises nothing
except distance.
For Jayes who is down with a tooth-ache
The fact is the same for most aches
but for tooth-ache, more so,
namely that the amplitude of its throbbing
awakens your consciousness to void.
The body, all of a sudden,
is an empty auditorium roaring to be filled.
If you prefer the analogy of a football field,
imagine two goalposts bracketing nothing.
As if the world were not enough
to break your heart, here is your own flesh,
bone and nerve conspiring against you,
steadily hacking your composure apart.
Having liberally spread the plum jam
of illusion on your body's dry toast,
you had convinced yourself that this
was delicious, unputdownable, worth it.
One piercing pain reminds you that
all you eat is lonely, that none of this food
will ease your way, that it's only a pill with
water's love that will have the final say.
When you close your eyes, a distant face
beckons you in the night. This distance
is the promise you must fill your ache with,
the road you must walk to reach your light.
To this Moment, An Ode
There is little planning to this
but as the last human unselfconsciously
recedes from the scene,
we are left as much to ourselves
as Adam and Eve
in Paradise without God.
Only this Paradise is a three by six
feet of car space divided by a gear
that cannot smoothen up our lives
beyond this ride but we being us,
prefer things creased and
let the gear be as it is.
Very thoughtfully, the rain tries
its best just then to distract.
On each side around us,
it is a grey-white wall that refuses
to yield the future. This moment
trapped in water is the only refuge.
It’s seasons past spring
but the heart is suddenly
a butterfly nest on the mind's leaf.
You talk of dogs — the ones you saved,
those you could not, those who left
even when they wanted to stay.
I want to tell you of wasted insect wings
that lie on my floor each morning,
an orgy of life consummated in death.
The sun has decided to join in after all
and the rain's walls are bulldozed by light.
We surrender to this brilliance as a gift.
Beyond, the world widens in anticipation.
The sun grows from mellow to gold.
The grass decides to wear its best green.
But we are prudent and pocket no dreams.
This road, we know, is a one-way
and there will be no coming back.
These poems were part of The Poetry Issue 2023, curated by Shireen Quadri. © The Punch Magazine. No part of these should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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