(AA) Canto 81: Arunachala
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The pyramids have been eroded by the desert wind, the marble broken by earthquakes, & the gold stolen by robbers, while the Veda remains, recited daily by an unbroken chain of generations, traveling like a great wave thro’ the living substance of mind
Jean Le Mee
Civilisations
This evening walk deserves a poem.
A plane gleaming over the suburbs
Sinks into the bluish dusk
Semezdin Mehmedinović
As truck on truck announced wide cityscape,
With glassy towers scraping hazy sky,
I hoped immediately to escape,
The modern world where monies multiply;
Where east meets west
This valley silicon
Like some ten-headed beast born for Armageddon.
A whirl of British companies,
Thought it better to offload
Its highly taxed dependencies
Sending British jobs abroad
Computerised communities
Spread down the KH road
Eye of the vortex that is man’s progress –
Sports complexes, xerox & western dress.
As I tried to leave the city
The streets were cramm’d gridlock,
Grimy, gritty, slimy, shitty,
Til well past eight o clock
A vision of commuter hell, confusing Ragnaraok.
Bangalore
December
2008
Kerala
Carry my soul to the tented
Gypsy mystic, tinted, scented,
Take it to be finger-printed
Reza Mohammadi
Thro’ groves of coconut boles we venture,
To stand where epic Lusiad lay ceased,
Fisher village where Vasco de Gama
First sank renaissance gaze upon the East;
Further along
I find a fair city,
Furnish’d with friendly throng & AC library.
They palanquin’d embassadours
Thro’ crowds wide-eyed & gawping,
Depositing those pale litters
At the ring’d toes of their king,
Decadent Zamorin glitters,
What did these envoys bring?
Strange instruments of medicine & war,
The winds of trade blown to his spicy shore.
The latest one-dayer play’d out
Twixt England & our hosts,
Sehwag bowl’d out, my single shout
A meal of lonely toasts…
Flintoff fires off the final runs…clientelle fade like ghosts.
Calicut
December
2008
Hippy
Ten days of peacocks, none dare speak,
From sitting legs-cross’d on cool floor
My knees groan aching as they creak
Angelica Freitas
Sailing between these tranquil backwaters,
Palm-fring’d horizon burst all around me,
Before this treasure gold of Kerala’s
All made to stand in stark humility,
For scenes like these
Reveal wond’rous nature –
We slipt with sweeten’d ease into Kollam harbour.
The beatnik & his blues guitar
Stumbl’d on this perfect place,
Clift portion of the Malabar;
Sand, ocean, sun & solace,
But secrets are soon scatter’d far,
The Western tourists race
To plant their towel standards on the beach
Round which limpet rest’rants & hotels leech.
I dined with maid Slovenian,
Talk’d art, Trieste & Rome,
Slow flirtation! Our supper done
I walk’d her half-way home,
To make love midst the wave-breaks while the moonbeams snaked the foam.
Varkala
December
2008
Three Seas
When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way
Ivan V. Lalić
At last the Ghats have peter’d to their end,
Sole, savage witch-peaks all which now remain,
Until we reach the grand Cormarin bend
Where ends Amritsar’s forty-eight hour train;
Join’d eclectic
In one wylde, chopping squall
Waves from the Antarctic, Araby & Bengal.
Ashes scatter’d on ocean stream,
Last remains of Mahatma,
Opponent of London’s regime
Nurtured in South Africa,
Returning preaching freedom’s dream
With soft satyahara –
This half naked fakir’s staff thin & long
Ensorcell’d his multitudinous throng.
Ghandi guides a blood red bindi
To rest upon the line
Slipping slowly into the sea,
The sky an evening wine,
I turn left face, step forth for North & Himalayan pine.
Kanayakamari
December
2008
Tamil Nadu
It has no name; silence is its name.
In the nothing, becoming nothing,
begetting nothing; this is everything
Chris Abani
I winch in each pinch of a varied view,
Shaking to this train’s novelty suspense,
After six sardine hours I’m plunged into
Some busy little city street intense;
Here to sample
Some scene which I was told,
India’s best temple bosom’d in urban fold.
The heart of the Dravidian
Fell to Vijiyanagar,
Who built a Hindu pantheon
Taller than its rising star,
Each kaleidoscopic mountain
Melodic without par,
Enough to urge grown women shed their tears,
Still painted heavenly ev’ry twelve years.
Opium! Coleridgean wish
Heeded by bloodshot man,
Dark, oily dish, crunch… ‘What is this?
Liquerice!…’ My mind’s span
Blew interspatial round the room as thought flew with the fan.
Madurai
December
2008
Indiana Byron
In a small side room appears
a broken-armed statue of Ganesh.
Touching the crumbled marble
Tiziana Colusso
Gorgeous Coromandel, crown prince of coasts,
My wanderlust has earn’d thine ancyent treats,
Meagre are glimpses of the Gallic ghosts
Dwelt within this grid of well ponder’d streets;
An antique chair,
Deep tann’d Gendarmerie,
All that retains the air transported from Paris.
Discovering rare poetry
Is the poet’s shooting star,
Like at Kannayakamari
Where stands Thiruvallavar,
Sri Aurobino’s Savitri,
On grand, Miltonic par,
Words wonderful, more wondrous to behold
Than Cortez did with Moctezuma’s gold.
I wafted in on inland scent
& left by soft, sea breeze,
Before I went…bemustach’d gent…
“A cool kingfisher please!”
I nearly piss’d myself when he hiss’d, “Thirty six rupees!”
Pondicherry
December
2008
Mystic Mountain
While his staff the traveller handles
In his weary journeying,
Thorns may tear his dusty sandals
TG Spear
As busses thunder over Tamil plains
I wonder why my muse has brought me here
Until, out of the misty monsoon rains,
Strange, solitary mountain-scapes appear;
Them mystic climb
& one especially
Inspires my mind to rhyme & find good poetry
“Arunachala rising red
Mountain of sacred musing,
Upon thy peak I’ll make a bed
& there with future fusing
I’ll sing the visions in my head
Happily perusing
Thro’ all the written scrolls of things to come
Such as… Chyren took Greece from Pergamum!”
I snapp’d out of that sayer-trance
& stept down from the bus
Into a handsome human dance
Of poori, fruit & fuss,
& faced the mountain as Saint Paul first sail’d from Ephesus
Thiruvannamali
December
2008
Lingamica
it is with joy that I sit
here. It is life I hold dear
in the ordinary quiet
Sally Nacker
As I ascend those smooth, bouldering slopes
My spiritus smouldering with desire
All history & all my heartfelt hopes
Kindle fresh sparks of man’s immortal fire;
My lips slow parch
As patterns they rehearse,
The long resounding march of old, heroic verse.
I have reach’d the sacred summit
Oer Thiruvannamali,
With the inkpen of the poet
& a modus of Magi,
Awaiting some untroubl’d fit
Those Deities supply,
To gently come into my feeble breast
& this falconic flight feel it infest.
I sat cross-legged, folded arms,
My third eye opens wide,
Beyond the farms, Pondy’s gendarmes,
The Bay of Bengal’s glide,
Then visions drive deep into space t’where sayer-stars abide.
Tamil Nadu
December
2008
Annagalactica
Fashioned to carry the world,
Satisfied with the shape of my nose,
Which should breathe all the air of the World
Bernard Dadié
Peering deep into planetary shift
Blisses man’s mind with Anaxagoras
Seeing events as they sway wide & drift
Thro happening’s full unexpectedness;
Pelagius
Defined the same seer-tricks
As divine Dante does descrying Beatrix.
& so, as strands of time converge,
On a space up in the spheres
Strange visions of events emerge
Far across the span of years
That flicker to & fro & surge
Til nearer each appears –
Strange omens of Jehova & the Beast
& that last battle in the Middle East.
When all these scenes eclampsian
Are driven off by dawn
Some laurel-mantl’d dragoman
On Siva’s sacred throne,
Etching grand mythopoeics, an epic hath turn’d to stone.
Arunachala
Mumble Words 