1. Lakshmanjhula
Turns a corner and falls strangely mute
Wide and stately, grown suddenly mature
One moment a maiden, the next the mother of the world,
Unfathomable; a rope bridge sways
Like an ascetic’s necklace of sticks across her breast.
On visibility’s edge an ancient memory burns:
Young and tender the limbs of the ascetic boy
A thought is a glance, a glance an arrow, an arrow fire
Which quenches forever the laughter of the maid,
A moment grown all eye and speechless
The heavenly river now burdened with human knowledge.
2. Kedarnath
Ant-like the car’s crawl up the giant hill
Close pressed by a ring of skyward climbing peaks
Dressed with bristling dense pine-odorous forests
And plunging cataracts like white garlands
The Mandakini snaking lazily far below.
In this desolate grandeur the awareness of a gaze
Brushing my shoulder like a cool benign touch
And surprised I turn to the blue mist ahead.
A hand has parted the veil
And towering in white magnificence
Kedarnath darshan – to behold and be beheld –
A moment frozen, immobile, incandescent,
Interminable. Then imperceptible, almost shy,
The veil drawn back, the memory erased,
The procession of peaks once more leading into the haze.
