I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.

Pablo Neruda

Rain

There’s something very reassuring about rainy evenings. About rain. It sort of gives me a sense of belonging. Weaves the bits and pieces of confused happenings together to give it a sense of continuity. As long as it rains like this, I know it’s the same life I lived. Loved. Live. Love. No matter what. Life for me is lived from one rainy evening to another. To think that it will always rain like this, no matter where we are, what we are doing, how we are in life! Will you not stare out of your office window one evening when it rains like this? Will you not think of the vapour-lamp lit streets in the rains? Of addas? Of random getting-caught-in-the-rains? Will it not make you smile, inside. Once? No matter where you are, will it not feel like home? To know that it’s the same rain that got you soggy on your way back home from some lousy tuition after school? Everytime I get wet in the rain, it gives me sanity to go on. Knowing, that there’s one thing that has been. Will be. That was, even when I wasn’t there to admire it. Love it. There’s something very reassuring about rainy evenings. About rain.

To Summer

It will not be very often when you'll remember a summer. Summers are dull moths. Dusty beige. No wing flapping. Graceless flights. Odor De-odor-ized. In countries like ours, and a city like Calcutta, Summer is the black sheep of the family.

Not loved. Not talked about. Not looked forward to.

And when winter, the sister married in New York, comes calling for her yearly trip (complaining all the while about the rising prices of Business Class fares and troubles of maintaining the Penthouse), summer goes back in to his small study in the attic... and reclines on the old squeaky armchair with a Neruda on his chest. The air fills with gasps and excitement as the gifts come out one by one. Binocular for her nephew and MP3 players(stacked with Ali Akbar) for the baba. The 'I love NY's...


'And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me..'

It will not be very often when you'll remember a Summer. Only this time, I will.

* awestruck *

"
And love is just a four-letter word and
so is fuck and so is fool how far
did you believe in those stories they
told you as a kid what
is it that makes you sleep now?

"

The woman is brilliant, isn't she? :)

Painted

Give me colors all shades of Blue

And a Red You wouldn’t mind

And I’d be the man

Chocolate brown on a bamboo ladder

So high up in the sky painting

Your skies the darkest shades of a grey blue.

Or that evening at the bridge of sighs

When the dust rose in the storm

When the dark waters swelled like bloated dreams

White crown like the toothpaste foam

On your lips the morning after Saturday night

Shared a mirror, we.

I could paint them all in Blue.

Then at night when the world would sleep

And make love and blow and cry

I’d climb inside my painted dreams

Into the swirling sky; that night

When the dust rose in the storm

When the dark waters swelled like bloated dreams

White crown like the toothpaste foam

On your lips the morning after a night

Shared a mirror, we.

To my God...from my God

My desires are many and my cry is pitiful,

but ever didst thou save me by hard refusals;

and this strong mercy has been wrought into my life through and through.

Day by day thou art making me worthy of the simple,

great gifts that thou gavest to me unasked---this sky and the light, this body and the

life and the mind---saving me from perils of overmuch desire.

There are times when I languidly linger

and times when I awaken and hurry in search of my goal;

but cruelly thou hidest thyself from before me.

Day by day thou art making me worthy of thy full acceptance by

refusing me ever and anon, saving me from perils of weak, uncertain desire.