When the Sun Bleeds

On evenings like tonight,
Words - fold their layered chiffon frills
Into neat tight buns, held together by a pin.
But then, as if at the count of 38 weeks -
Break into blossom.

Words, seizing uncontrollably,
Like an unimmunized infant -
With a soiled umbilical stump.

They have an old story to tell,
To an old windowed audience.
But in both the teller and the told -
Few faces have transformed.

In the crimson blush of a setting summer sun,
A woman gazed with deep, pitch black eyes.
They said she was thinking of a man.
Really? Can you think of a lover
with such apathy?
With eyes that cut you like flat black pearls -
Neither sorrow nor joy.
As if she had put the matter to rest,
Swallowed her aloneness in one virtuoso swig.

But then there were others,
many many more.
Who missed the rare moment,
When the shy summer sun,
Rained its red emotions
Bared the pink bruises on its own blundering heart.

Perhaps it wasn't apathy at all then.
She couldn't possibly dream of lost lovers...
The black-eyed woman -
Was too busy watching;
Watching in wounded wonder
As the summer sun bled,
Drop after drop
A deeper and thicker red
Until it sank, listlessly
In the vastness of its own blood
And died.

Oct 2nd, 2011.

Doctoring Myself

[A testament of impending death
Hastily scampered, out her mouth as if
She could never again speak, did she falter then.]

I have reason to believe
The red sun sets, slanting
Oftimes, in a capricious east.


The permeating aura
Of blue pre-dawn stars
Speckles this pair of onyx pupils.


I have accumulated
Too much suffering
Within a pint of murmuring blood.


My curing days are over
I ambulate mechanically,
And healing had always been a ruse.


I wish to lay down my white-coat
And cradling some dolls and a weathered wand
Retire to a cave behind the western falls, forever.


April 19th, '09.




Blast from the past...nice.

Rumble Rumble Rain

Did I mention rain?
Rain, the color of rust and irish shamrocks.
Of blue ice cubes in June.
Rain, rivering roads.
Coloring the dusted jakaranda purple,
The forlorn grey skies a little bright blue.
Rain, that swells my heart,
From a grumpy frumpy rubble
To a happy yappy bubble!

Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

Wade_Davis_Why_Ancient_Wisdom_Matters_in_the_Modern_World

W. Davis: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World What does it mean to be human and alive? The thousands of different cultures and languages on Earth have compellingly different answers to that question. "We are a wildly imaginative and creative species," declares Wade Davis, and then proves it with his accounts and photographs of humanity plumbing the soul of culture, of psyche, and of landscape. The threat to cultures is often ideological, Davis notes, such as when Mao whispered in the ear of the Dalai Lama that "all religion is poison," set about destroying Tibetan culture. The genius of culture is the ability to survive in impossible conditions, Davis concludes. We cannot afford to lose any of that variety of skills, because we are not only impoverished without it, we are vulnerable without it.

Date: Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800 Location: San Francisco, CA, Cowell Theatre, Long Now Foundation Program

And left behind are wrecks of ships...

Strangely unsettling.

On a sticky warm June evening,
out of a foggy random happening,
Memory - breaks out like dawn,
peeling away muffling layers of carefully draped darkness
until all that remains
is raw, formless, soul-eating emotion,
pincer-grasping one's heart and dangling it around...
a game of cat and mouse...
a killer whale with an unfortunate seal.

So kind of karma
that such deliberation is halted
by an abrupt rambunctious cacophony
of a very young, very naive, very dreamy spirit.

One cannot stay too sad, too long,
for there is much to be done.
So much to be done
for someone still dreams.

The hurt heart learns to live wrecked dreams through the ships of others...
others who haven't hit the blank, gray, shore-less ocean of hopelessness.

June 24, 2011.

Here and there

A long-promised collection of memories from my adventures in over twenty of the united states:

Memoirs of Travels in USA

Will add many more with time.

"It must be hard, not really knowing."
"It hurts... a lot sometimes. But you know what must hurt more?
Knowing.
Knowing and then watching the sand slip away.
Between the two of us, I feel I have suffered less.
I haven't much to regret....
I tried."

- Dialogues

'Eyes' for an Eye

Rain-washed winds swayed brittle brown boughs
Hurting forth April leaflets pink with pain. 
Spring-heralds in all lands, seem to discern human woes,
[Season-lapsed by latitude, yet comfortingly humane]


"Eyes for an eye", a song sparrow whispered
[Idioms history-proofed to comfortably dismiss
Thousands labelled "collateral damage" -
Never mourned, never medalled
Unforgiven, unforgotten
 Corollaries to a 'higher' cause]


Persecution, alienation, estrangement, hostility -
Several scarce used words unveiled their meanings.
The fear of an enemy was re-incarnated.
The power of nightmares
[Infused into armor and rapier]
Wielded and struck anew.


A brood of eyrie-born, myopic eaglets rejoice -
The scorpion king was squashed in a distant desert.

May 4th, 2011.

From The Independent.co.uk

Robert Fisk: If this is a US victory, does that mean its forces should go home now?

So why are we in Afghanistan? Didn't the Americans and the British go there in 2001 to fight Osama bin Laden? Wasn't he killed on Monday? There was painful symbolism in the Nato airstrike yesterday – scarcely 24 hours after Bin Laden's death – that killed yet more Afghan security guards. For the truth is that we long ago lost the plot in the graveyard of empires, turning a hunt for a now largely irrelevant inventor of global jihad into a war against tens of thousands of Taliban insurgents who have little interest in al-Qa'ida, but much enthusiasm to drive Western armies out of their country.

The gentle hopes of Hamid Karzai and Hillary Clinton – that the Taliban will be so cowed by the killing of Bin Laden that they will want to become pleasant democrats and humbly join the Western-supported and utterly corrupt leadership of Afghanistan – shows just how out of touch they are with the blood-soaked reality of the country. Some of the Taliban admired Bin Laden, but they did not love him and he had been no part of their campaign against Nato. Mullah Omar is more dangerous to the West in Afghanistan than Bin Laden. And we haven't killed Omar.

Iran, for once, spoke for millions of Arabs in its response to Bin Laden's death. "An excuse for alien countries to deploy troops in this region under the pretext of fighting terrorism has been eliminated," its foreign ministry spokesman has said. "We hope this development will end war, conflict, unrest and the death of innocent people, and help to establish peace and tranquility in the region."

Newspapers across the Arab world said the same thing. If this is such a great victory for the United States, it's time to go home; which, of course, the US has no intention of doing just now.

That many Americans think the same thing is not going to change the topsy-turvy world in which US policy is framed. For there is one home truth which the world still has not grasped: that the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt – and, more pressing, the bloodbaths in Libya and Syria and the dangers to Lebanon – are of infinitely graver importance than blowing away a bearded man who has been elevated in the West's immature imagination into Hitlerian proportions.

Turkish prime minister Erdogan's brilliant address in Istanbul yesterday – calling for the Syrians to stop killing their people and for Gaddafi to leave Libya – was more eloquent, more powerful and more historic than the petty, boastful, Hollywood speeches of Obama and Clinton on Monday. We are now wasting our time speculating who will "take over" al-Qa'ida – Zawahiri or Saif al-Adel – when the movement has no "leadership" as such, Bin Laden being the founder rather than the boss.

But, a day being a long time in the killing fields of the Middle East, just 24 hours after Osama Bin Laden died, other questions were growing thicker yesterday. If, for example, Barack Obama really thinks the world is "a safer place" after Bin Laden's death, how come the US has increased its threat alert and embassies around the world are being told to take extra precautions against attack?

And just what did happen in that tatty compound – no longer, it seems, a million-dollar "mansion" – when Bin Laden's sulphurous life was brought to an end? Human Rights Watch is unlikely to be the only institution to demand a "thorough, transparent investigation" into the killing.

There was an initial story from Pentagon "sources" which had two of Bin Laden's wives killed and a woman held as a "human shield" dying too. Within hours, the wives were alive and in some accounts, the third woman simply disappeared.

And then of course, there's Pakistan, eagerly telling the world that it participated in the attack on Bin Laden, only to have President Zardari retract the entire story yesterday. Two hours later, we had an American official describing the attack on Bin Laden as a "shared achievement".

And there's Bin Laden's secret burial in the Arabian Sea. Was this planned before the attack on Bin Laden, with the clear plan to kill rather than capture him? And if it was carried out "according to Islamic rights" – the dead man's body washed and placed in a white shroud – it must have taken a long time for the officer on the USS Carl Vinson to devise a 50-minute religious ceremony and arrange for an Arabic-speaking sailor to translate it.

So now for a reality check. The world is not safer for Bin Laden's killing. It is safer because of the winds of freedom blowing through the Middle East. If the West treats the people of this region with justice rather than military firepower, then al-Qa'ida becomes even more irrelevant than it has been since the Arab revolutions.

Of course, there is one positive side for the Arab world. With Bin Laden killed, the Gaddafis and the Salehs and the Assads will find it all the more difficult to claim that a man who is now dead is behind the popular revolutions trying to overthrow them.

Wednesday, 4 May 2011

Images

Summer trotted up the stairs, mid-afternoon
Smelling of patched memory
Weaving its way, precariously,
Out of distant, neatly cursive clouds
Spaced out like Dickinson's carefully meted verse
On the arched, gray-blue south-east.


The pale pink of a birthday bouquet
Crept out of alstroemerias
And drove off to the grocers
Looking to barter -
Uninvited affection, for a morsel of cheap hope.


The memory of a moonlit night
Stirred the gathering gloom
Glowing ghostly, like the struggling sun
Overtaken by thick, steel-gray, coastal city-fog.
Memory - spiked with citrus vodka, go-karts and disillusionment.


Truth made a reckless leap,
From glossed lips to a curly haired shoulder
And huddled, whimpering like a hurt puppy
In a corner of wood-brown, insecure, escapist eyes.
Dashed dreams were wiped on a napkin
discarded hopelessly, at the lunch table.


April 23rd & 24th, 2011.

If you come by...

by Rukhiya Faheem. (One of the greatest poems I've read)


My tongue has grown a rough red,
That color of prison walls-
It nibbles off punctured dreams
And burrows, leaving dust in my marrow.
I’ve grown fainter, but cozier,
For such lifelessness is rampant.

I’ve recalled too much, of us
In the span of a stolen bit of paper.
Carved several children
Out of a dense nebulous memory.

Contained all our decaying causes in a jar,
And let my cares rub over smooth stones
So, I could slip onto them this
Bitter taste of a prolonged promise.

If you come by, bring me, but one thing -
An innocent hollow night,
Which cannot be filled
To a full.

Madeeha

[A birthday gift by Rukhiya Faheem.]

I should wish to call you a fairy
If we both could dismiss the garish curves of her sorcery.

I delight in you, your colors
The stretch of your smile
The waves of your voice
That seem to breach, gently.
Undo and untie my webs, set me breathing
And then as you leave, you keep the doors ajar and approachable to bored spiders until I am calling from the stickiness.

You write and say words that fill me to my fingertips and then are kind to listen to the same from my mouth.
I wish to compare you to the morning flowers, to the depths of rivers, to the scarceness of peace, to bareness, to the overwhelming dramas on the skies herearound and to several everyday things.
I also wish to convey all this without actively conveying.
(Since we’ve haven’t met yet, you might not notice my shortcomings)

The Sun at dawn and dusk,
The white of the moon, and the early stars
The dull buzz of a bee
The red of strawberries
The not-poised-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue things
Are you, in different forms.

Like all our abrupt ends I’ll sign off from this dialogue with this-
What swirls in me and then rests pleasantly on my heart
Is love, I am certain
For myself and to what it could be (that is you.)

Spring by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Spring

TO what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough.

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St. Vincent Millay



http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap110401.html

Oranges - by Gary Soto

The first time I walked
With a girl, I was twelve,
Cold, and weighted down
With two oranges in my jacket.
December. Frost cracking
Beneath my steps, my breath
Before me, then gone, 
As I walked toward
Her house, the one whose 
Porch light burned yellow
Night and day, in any weather.
A dog barked at me, until
She came out pulling 
At her gloves, face bright
With rouge. I smiled,
Touched her shoulder, and led 
Her down the street, across
A used car lot and a line 
Of newly planted trees,
Until we were breathing
Before a drugstore. We
Entered, the tiny bell
Bringing a saleslady
Down a narrow aisle of goods.
I turned to the candies
Tiered like bleachers,
And asked what she wanted–
Light in her eyes, a smile
Starting at the corners
Of her mouth. I fingered
A nickel in my pocket,
And when she lifted a chocolate
That cost a dime,
I didn’t say anything.
I took the nickel from 
My pocket, then an orange,
And set them quickly on 
The counter. When I looked up,
The lady’s eyes met mine, 
And held them, knowing 
Very well what it was all 
About.
Outside,
A few cars hissing past,
Fog hanging like old
Coats between the trees.
I took my girl’s hand
In mine for two blocks,
Then released it to let
Her unwrap the chocolate.
I peeled my orange
That was so bright against
The gray of December
That, from some distance,
Someone might have thought
I was making a fire in my hands.

-Gary Soto

http://matthewkaberline.blogspot.com/2008/04/gary-soto-oranges.html

The painful beauty of empathy...

As Dreamers do

Snow no more, it will soon.

Someone will walk, drag their weary body yet

From a mid-May springtime, to a scorching June

Where the blundering, mystifying, greening rains

Light up hearts with a thousand colors –

In a land where it snows not.

Come February, and fist-sized Sambal

Shall paint the dried up, mist-borne landscape –

A flaming rouge…

Someone will pause, pause amidst the splendor

And smile for snowflakes

Those tiny memoirs of a cold cold warmth.

Dreamers shall weave newer dreams yet,

With their novel amalgamated palette –

Blending the light of longed-for sun-rays

Into the magical romance of soul-drenching rains.

Sun and rain –

Rainbows, myriads of splinters of color

Shall burst forth from a frail presence.

Someone will have the leisure,

The leisure and the heart –

To twirl a thought in their fingers

Just long enough

To paint a canvas yet.

More verses shall be written yet.

Feb 13^th, 2011.

Buffalo's Skyline from my Window

So what are the things buffalonians could spot?

1.St. Ann's Church 
2. St. Stanislaus Bishop & Martyr Church
3. The not-yet-risen Sun
4. Clouds - the weavers of magic
5. Countless windmills in the land far far away...


Hmmm... will have to inquire for more :)

There was a time... We were beautiful

Beautifully magical poetry (by Ahmed Shameem) sung by one of the loveliest of voices (Nayyara Noor):

Once... We were beautiful

Here follows an effort at translation that cannot do justice, but the colors seem to shine through even in a different language.

Note: "Us" and "We" are sometimes used in urdu as slightly impersonal substitutes for "Me" and "I". In this poem they seem kindof an effort to divert attention and sound less narcisstic, thought the use can have many meanings depending on context.

Once... We were beautiful

There was a time... We were beautiful

There was a time... We were beautiful

Like the lasting scent settled in oft-read books

Our breaths were hushed.

With the palette of a myriad unsaid words,

We used to paint murals.

On the wings of warblers, we'd carve poems

And sing them... to nestlers on far-off lakes...

Who lived far far from us...

yet were so near our hearts...

When labors of another day

Alighted in our garden, with the light of dawn

We used to say:

"Mama! these butterflies have such pretty wings".

Oh dear, kiss us...

Kiss us on the forehead

For we long to soar to the lands of

Butterflies,

Fireflies...

For rainbow fireflies,

Butterflies of light... beckon us thither...

Labors of another day mingle

With gentle breeze drenched in color

And beckon us through the window...

Oh dear, kiss us...

Kiss us on the forehead

Kiss us on the forehead...