Half Aroma Half Face

These poems were published in the book Half Aroma Half Face by Writers Workshop, Kolkata


Nocturnes

There is a wind within a wind, a wheel that sleeps in a wheel that sleeps in it.
My love is like a green field and I am like a green field laid for her.
Flight of white birds, river of light, silence
Carry the messages of our existence to That
Who is all around. ...more

Meditations on Loss

Even yesterday your eyes gripped the road
Dirty liquid of a diverse passion that was transmuted in your blood
But today the roads are gone
They are there but they have flown
Time has left you. ...more

Three Metaphysical Poems

The reluctances of earth tighten and painful longing backward pressed
Breaks to the acts of hint and secret gesture:
The air thickens with ambiguity. ...more

Two Poems on Durga

Behold the princess on her lion-mount
Slender like a lotus-stalk her arching torso,
Like its bud her jewelled head. In the hurtling rush
And tangled confusion of battling bodies, clear
...more

Two Himalayan Poems

The boisterous river rushing between rocks
Turns a corner and falls strangely mute
Wide and stately, grown suddenly mature
One moment a maiden, the next the mother of the world, ...more

Taj

One sees her first afar between dream and awaking
Courtyards of white and white arches prepare the gaze
Frames enclosing a real which teases illusion. ...more

Three Anti poems

One moonlit smoke night
Walking back past the railway bridge -
A patter of rain and hurrying feet on the stairs –
It came out for a stroll.
...more

Kashmir

Robert Plant and Jimmy Page in the 70s
Paid their tribute to the visionary territory
Meadows of saffron and poppy ringed with glaciers
Secret glens where the bovine unicorn roamed
...more

Shah Jehan’s Last Letter

It isn’t for the getting that my days were spent
Life is patterned after mnemonic stories
From east to west the pages reek of war
Journeys of plunder and possession, punishment and victory ...more

Two Japanese Poems

Cars flowing across Uji bridge at sunset
Fail to see the ghost of Yoshitsune
Grimacing in his exotic and bloodied armour. ...more