I will lift up my eyes to the hills-
from whence comes my help?
My help comes from the Lord
Who made heaven and earth.
(Psalm 121:1, 2)

Face of Man

Face of Man
Jacqueline du Pre

Sunday, March 30, 2008

You

Knowing all things
Should I be?
I, made ignorant by too much knowledge,
Should rather like to know you first
Before knowing the ways of the world I live in.
Through knowing you I shall know all things.
Being with you is to be everywhere
And
All things are complete in you
Without being finished
In the world circumscribed by my blinded eyes.

Whenever you walk into my mind

Whenever you walk into my mind
My eyes become filled
With clouds of Assamese monsoon;
The iceberg beneath my breast
Being warmed by melting blood
Bursts out in precarious imbalance
Steadied only by an unknowing wisdom.
This
Strangely feeling
Amidst uncommonly stirrings
Is vividly comforting.
Even the unruly words
Which so brazenly
Make my lips utterly
Stand silently
Whenever you walk into my thoughts.

Monday, March 24, 2008

Perhaps So

I like the sound of your warm summer voice
Tender and organic
Also I like the golden threads of hair
Falling
On your face of gentle marble
Your eyes of oceanic melancholy
Filled with fire and new day

A heart of flesh and blood implanted in a statue
A heart of flesh beating fast in the vortex of dark nights
A heart of flesh wondering
If love has a fragrance, flavor or a color
If love were a happy melancholia
If love were an untamable beast
And if it spoke in tongues
Perhaps, love is a note of exclamation
In the systolic and diastolic heartbeats
Or just a dream full of questions
Perhaps so
Perhaps it is so
But when it arrives
Even a soul saturated with dirt and soil turns into
A newborn butterfly spreading its wings of transient immortality

Sunday, March 23, 2008

Learning to walk

City of dream
A city in a dream
Descending
With a strange joyous melancholy
Of a church bell
Ringing
Far somewhere in the sky
Upon the shadowed walls of

Dreaming
Dreams with thousand walls
Walls with thousand doors
If these doors did not open into one dream
If these dreams did not wake up into one river
And if this river did not flow into itself
Would I crumble and fall back
As broken water
Upon an abandoned altar

Here

Amidst all the unmapped corners
And forgotten census
Let me pause to offer
A simple hymn to God of Resurrection
And fruitfulness and happy death

That

For a change
I may kick the habit of being myself
And stretch out the boulevards
Unfold all the avenues and vistas
Heat up the sidewalks scorched by winter
Open wide the gates of freshly baked bread
And malls of fleshy grapes of succulent life
Perhaps in such imagining
Life may find a brief respite from its many schemes

I can not hold on for long to
The leftover laughter of yesterday’s carnival
I will have to build shelters
To shelter the homeless thoughts

For

What are books without pages
What are pages without thoughts
And what are thoughts without men
And what are dreams if we can not undream them
To chart out a new blueprint for a
Full measure of an undetermined destiny
And a little cottage at the edge
Of an expanding town

For a change
Let me raise my hands and touch
My furrowed forhead
For a change
Let me no longer pretend at undreaming
And perchance wake up free of harsh regrets

Sunday, March 16, 2008

In a universe created by you

Having oriented myself towards you in the east
I turn naturally my back on you in the west.
Having learned to speak a language,
I forget so easily that you speak many languages.

O Lord,
While the east and the west on the same locus may
Never be,
But wherever you are, you are everywhere.
In whichever language we pray to you,
We will always pray in a language you have placed
Upon our tongues.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

A poem for a harlot

In the evening
Clad in your diaphanous skin
You walk the streets without name
Not knowing where they will take you

Tlok tlok tlok
The sound of your feathered footsteps
As light as the snowflakes of February

With the sound of your heartbeat
You time
The passage of epochs and eras
And your walk becomes
The unalterable rhythm of living

In your gait
All the elements of life are woven
Into a seamless piece of fabric
your body of gold
Epithets of shame when sewn onto
Your skin of ether become stars
And your body is the limitless sky
And you dear lady
You become a constellation

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Liberals or Conservatives?

I believe that a society, at any point in time, is a product of dynamic give and take relation that exists between the liberalizing and conserving forces. To espouse liberal ideas is not necessarily unchristian. Jesus Himself taught some liberal ideas without undermining His identity and mission. “It is not against the law to do good deeds on Sabbath” being one among many. In my humble opinion, a society that chooses love over its laws will be an ideal Christian society. Where there is love there is no distinction between liberals and conservatives. Also, without the liberalizing forces, a society would turn into fossil. Similarly, without the conservatives, the society will inevitably slip into chaos. We need them both in our society and Church. I believe,for us Catholics, each idea and issue, regardless of theirlabels, has to be examined not only logically for maximal common good but also with our Catholic conscience.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Moses also Carried His Cross

In a voice quiet and gentle, God calls,
“Moses, Musa, where are you?”

Here, I am, O Lord, wandering in the wilderness,
Searching for water in the sand
And seeking solace among uprooted acacia trees.

The sun gathers its last rays
From mountain tops and valleys
And turn into a cluster of oranges ripened by
Soft autumn heat and sweetened water.

Lord, out of slavery I have brought them this far,
To this thirsty country of
No man’s inheritance.
This fractured land and of deep furrows,
A heartbreak can set it on fire.

I scratch the desert soil
And see the future
Slipping through my fingers.
The silence!
The silence asks me without asking,
“What have you done with us, Moses?”

From the mountaintop
The valley looks tranquil and grotesquely beautiful.
Funny, how distance masks the reality!
Funny, from a distance, how easy it is
To conjure up an illusion of happiness,
Even from the misery of sand and
Sun-dried rocks!

In the distance when we hear a thrush or a nightingale sing,
We believe it is the desert wind playing tricks with our mind.
In the distance if we see a palm tree, we think it is a mirage.
When will you lead us out of our altered reality?
Lord, my people are about to stone me.

Lighten up, Musa. I desire to make you glad
And prosper the work of your hands.

Come, people are thirsty and impatient,
Thirst is crawling up their throats,
And their parched tongues are turning into vipers.
Come, let us quench their thirst
By turning stones
Into icebergs in the desert.
Strike, strike with your staff,
These rocks of Horeb and let them
Melt like snowflake in the sun.
And let my people to their heart’s content drink.

O Lord!
I have with my own eyes seen
When you made water divide the day and night
And the sea, like melon in Egyptian summer,
Fell apart as two slices of moon.
Lord, you are our refuge.
Without you,
We are dust returning to being mere dust.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

So, how can they stop me

How else can they stop a nightingale sing if not by slitting its throat?
How else can they stop an eagle from flying if not by ripping its wings off?
How else can they stop me from loving them if not by breaking my heart?
They will come, they will come seeking neither water nor food but my blood;
And I will give them my heart, let them strike at my breast, pierce my heart.
But, my heart, Moses, is indestructible and my love is immutable.

So, how can they stop me from loving them?

Absence

Between the departure and arrival,
From one home of disfigured fortune to another,
You have barely begun your short biography.
On the water were your footprints,

And some unreadable names, written in your blood.
In that geography of brilliant sunshine and endless searching,

We discovered, the excavated landscape of your fragile anatomy.

Ah, Angel!
With your innocence,

You faced the monster.
With death, you paid the price!
And in return we admit in shame,
We could not do you
Justice, you so deserve.
We failed you!

Oh, child of imaginary parents!
To be left so high and dry,
Is it to be your fate always?

Oh, those imaginary parents!
Are they real only in a hallucinated world?

Rise, Angel, rise from the belly of volcano.
Rise from your deep eternal slumber.

Rise with rising sun and freshness of morning.
Let ripples of flowing water cry out.
Let stones of rivers also cry out in protest,
Till absence itself rises with the elements
To unriddle, the enigma you left us.


In your memory,
I plant a drop of ink,
In the sky of this blank page,
May it become a witness to the horror, you saw
In the twilight hours of your frightened eyes.

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