The hibiscus

A poem a day written in July 2014

A.J.Rao
Contents
The natural 1
Taut plot 2
Authentic holes 3
Flesh 4
Daydreams 5
Twilight 6
Praise 7
Back 8
Quarrels 9
Beating vision back 10
Bamboo 11
Trance 12
Lineaments 13
First things 14
Port of call 15
Disturbance in the west 16
Blind words 17
Old woman 18
Braid 19
Permanent ink 20
Black buck 21
Nothing 22
Not seeing star or smelling lamp 23
Senses 24
Paddy 25
Bricks 26
Binary 27
Memory is to forget 28
Inside snake 29
The leaf fan 30
1
The natural
we are natural and ones decaying,
beach boat disintegrating, a dusk
in the fatness of a body , our smile
we are children of ma fatly sitting
on her smile at our hands passing
how they were grubby below nails
but our nature ma is also her rage
swirling around the steadfast rock
and going detour around a temple
it is she who bore us at new dawn
persisted with us in hills and moon
in a sky of white words like clouds
it is she who will change our skins
a slough we turn over to her rocks
so it will announce we once lived.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: the natural
2
Taut plot
One has no dreams in afternoons
Only daymares, belly fish of fears
Wrought into heavy-lidded sleep,
Mares ,not being equine animals
Of diurnal type but the belly ones
Where you enact fearful plotlines.
Caucasian doctor from anywhere
Appears by your side to diagnose
An unnoticed fleshly protuberance
On neck, way to a two year death.
Story is scripted by a ghost writer
Of random ghoulish department.
Everything is random but stiched
Neatly together like by a pro hack,
A belly fear knotted to a taut plot.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: taut plot
3
Authentic holes
Our words turn out to be authentic life
A breath not yet snapped,a wind going
In a mouth-hole, a water hole for eyes
A nosy hole to smell real world passing
A matter in nine holes, open to the sky.
Words are a world, in and out of breath
Authentic life, touchy-feely, eyes open.
All our words make some hole or other,
Poems most authentic holes made ever.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: authentic holes
4
Flesh
Flesh is word that came twice
And so willing, with weak spirit
One that trembled in windows
All those that held no July rain
On pots of earthly plants eager
In balcony for first nectar sips .
Thinking flesh trembles in fear
When it comes twice in search
For a word, death in the air like
Dog flesh rotting on a highway
Fighting army of spirited flies.
The earthly plants have no flesh
Only spirit in the sap,our breath
From flesh that will rot like dog
On a highway fighting an army
Of August flies, a spirit in flesh.
In the third time, flesh is weak
But the spirit is strong in bark
A nights wail from weak flesh.
This time round spirit is willing.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: flesh
5
Daydreams
I have my daydreams in the night
Tucked under blanket full of sleep,
A tortoise carrying world on back.
My feet are gathered up in blanket
Into an earth-ball,a sphere like ice
Tingling palms like they were kids.
Umbrella is world shrunk to a cloth
A mosquito net all around my body
Its mosquito rain kept away in buzz.
My daydreams are all about a night
When I shall have dreams in which
My free will scripts their plot lines.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: daydreams
6
Twilight
Let us get down to business,we said
Promptly acknowledging the hour,
The crepuscle, so far away, yet near.
Our twilight blinks a transitory day
A moving shadow on a series of hills
Like overcast eagle looking for prey.
This is the time of cows return dust
The hoofs lightly askew in earth hour
To home, a night advancing in moon.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: twilight
7
Praise
This night holds no praise for us
But for a worlds past it holds up
All the candles , right up to a sky
What do we do, Rilke,but praise
Night after night for its curtains,
Anonymitys unnamed curtains
That exist side by side,with name,
Other dimensions, other branes
Not just brains that disappeared
Behind woolly containers, nights
Of two-dimensional plastic worlds
Of time ,beyond our eyes and kin.
Praise we do since we cant trust
Bodies,in their living discussions.
Their eye holes will take in night
Like whoosh of the wind in skulls
After both stillness and wild fight
Know them like star and storm.
( Taking off on Rilkes poem O tell us what do you do..)
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: priase, rilke's poem
o tell us..
8
Back
The young actress by her back
Announces style,like chocolate
In an advertisement ,in which
Surprise ice handfuls get flung
At lovers before chocolate bars.
They love bodies and chocolate.
We are the art lovers of cinema
Where a silence hangs heavily
Between speech bits and eyes.
Our silence goes ice,when silver
And speech somewhat muddy
Like a stale death that is news.
Our backs are shiny with balms
We advertise for domestic love.
The womans eyes fall so softly,
Her back between us and bones.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: back
9
Quarrels
We look back at those times
Filled with quarrels of house,
In arguments fine like pollen.
Now all that dust has settled,
As a fine flower dust of bees
Floating behind times walls,
These very bees are star dust
Making honey in night skies.
There were sounds in the roof
That rattled lizards from tiles
And some times brought out
Snakes coiled around beams
Pretending about quarrels,
As boy questions on snakes
At sleep, when they slithered.
We pretended to perfection.
We will pretend about them
As we will be dust in our sky.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: quarrels
10
Beating vision back
Child is beaten in the flesh
Mostly to beat vision back
And in the ways of all flesh,
A world of dark blind men.
A teachers stentorian cane
Misses no flesh in the class
If it is from no money, all love.
There is flesh between kids
And a rhythmic fall of cane.
The school self-teaches flesh
A thing or two about money.
Canes teach kids love in flesh
A flowing river of their eyes.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: beating vision back
11
Bamboo
We see it as a passing shadow
A twist that soon straightens
To sing flute of balmier times.
We do not reckon persistence
Of shadows, darkest to pop up
Behind paled ones like waves
That come one after the other.
Supposing your bamboo stops
And there is a silence that falls
Will persistence pay dividends
Of white lights in incoming ship
Making its way in the dark sea?
Yes ,if you sing for ironic state
When there is neither bamboo
Nor fingers to play in the holes.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: bamboo
12
Trance
Now I recall a goddess-trance ,
Dark woman falling on others
A fiery setting of yellow flame.
An old Irish poem talks about
A ill-tonsured saint, intoning
In front of a table, in front of
House,a saint double mapped.
Was he in holy ghost trance?
Trance is escape from place
A locus with no coordinates.
A double mapping in front of
A table in front of his house
Hardly makes history trance
Of shaved head, from the sea.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: trance
13
Lineaments
Let us trace our lineaments
And find them the same as
Worlds that we have drawn
And poet discovered before
His own bucket was kicked,
His waters formed thin sliver
To disappear in the dry sun.
Lineaments are mine, yours,
The scratchy earth -globes
A face that is soon laughter
Its eyes bottomless craters .
We whirl the globe and find
Lineaments much the same.
A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he
peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms,
mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments,
stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he
discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the
lineaments of his own face. Afterword to El hacedor, 1960
Jorge Luis Borges
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: lineaments
14
First things
A sip of water is our breeze
A rain promise on stretcher,
Dog failing to bark at sleep,
A shadow curled as corner.
First things first ,not always.
Face book is dog of awaking,
Bark unfilled, shout unheard
A voice from fellow humans
Since embalmed in a desert.
Bodies are first things first
Minds pluralistic, politically.
Poetics is matter of rhyme,
Verbs felt missing a doing,
First things many times last.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: first things
15
Port of call
There I saw she was a port of call
Content to be one , a grocery call
On way to home, beyond shadows
Of the earth line lying in snug sky.
Home is emotion thing,a warm bed
A nose-sneezing tissue for winters
Wrapped in polythene to put away,
A creaky bed,for nights of despair.
The home thing crackles with love,
Fiercely committed to body in love,
Body that sizzles and will be gone.
Why would one be home, she said.
A port of call recalls no ship names.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: port of call
16
Disturbance in the west
Due to el nino of weather these things
Shake our states ,from beings of light,
At night and other times of our sleep
On days when every poem goes awry,
A wind blows but no water to splurge.
There is yet an uprising of cloud fairy
From mountain distance,a wind speak
In trees , dancing their flowing hair
Dispelling birds from sleeping minds,
A quiet hair,nested by night to dawn.
All this is in the eye of the Arabian sea
On the west, through the narrow pass
In the western mountains, where knots
Of lines swelled in our confused maps
Promising uprising but it was a fizzle.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: disturbance
17
Blind words
Words came down desultorily
From vague and unknown sky
Like the police siren of a night
Competing for a sky with dogs,
Their barks piercing sleeps and
A night watchmans stick taps.
They came from prose space
Born from a Borges blindness
A night blind like Borges wild,
A kings labyrinth on a desert.
Words are stars dropping dead
On the vastness of his desert.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: blind words
18
Old woman
She was the old woman of our age
As we hurtled towards our old age,
Her crinkle too young for our age.
Her body shook an entire laughter,
Acting life like it was no real thing.
An old woman of our essential age,
Her body wrinkled as if it laughed
Its guts out, emptying inner bags
Of its several childhood laughters
Spilling on the floor, rolling over
As inside-splitting ,old hag bodies
That had gone and to go hereafter.
(At the ripe age of 102 , the veteran actress Zohra Sehgal passed
two days ago)
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: old woman
19
Braid
Girls braid is a full-blown snake
Smelling fragrantly of jasmines
As it sits on a girls head within.
Girl goes to school unlike other
Who shimmies on airtight rope
For family stomach,on the road.
Girl braid is knotted in grandma
Mama wants cropped and gone.
Girl braid is snake no one wants.
Braids and grandmas are dated.
Let them remain in the ant-hills
Under wild life protection laws.
(watching a Kannada film Moggina Jade)
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: braid
20
Permanent ink
We were born in the cloth, our valley
The sad tale of tears, of a lower pain.
Birth had nothing to do with erasure
When we would go breathless dying.
Really we are permanent ink, Indian.
We are sketches, thickened outlines,
Walking silhouettes at orange dusks.
Born in cloth we are permanent ink.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: permanent ink
21
Black buck
There they love their animals
Film stars no less, in a jungle.
When black buck dies by star
Arguments go by black gowns
About deaths entertainment,
Their cogency tested in silver,
In sweaty summer civil courts.
What shines is black and buck.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: black buck
22
Nothing
Nothing seemed a translation
Without an original, the poem
Unboxed without its contents
Its seamless thought packed
In memory words, a dialectic.
Who needs dialectic but poem
With no poet,making happen-
Who needs a poet,without life
Who needs life without poem
Who needs poem but nothing.
Here we do with a translation
The poet making it all happen,
From nothing ,only empty air
But air is not nothing but life
Life at its breath and happen
A translation without original.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: nothing
23
Not seeing star or smelling lamp
We found it was night again
As is always , to turn the day,
A shadow of house in space,
A space we may die to live in
Experience what it is to die.
A whistle from nights heart
A bark from the guts of dog
A creak from a whirring fan
Are nights signs of life like
The lamp in its death throes,
Its oil a last breath of flame
Or faint Arundhati by night
Finger-pointed to new weds.
The dying do not see the star
Dimmer by bright neighbour
Nor smell dying oil of lamp.
One crosses life to see death.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: not seeing star or
smelling lamp
24
Senses
The rich paddy fields are country
With a woman under her goddess
Rising to hit bodies, passionately
Asleep in husbands lap, dreams
Troubling sleeping mind in body.
Five and country senses sharper,
I now try mindful of the country
Overgrown tree paradise staying
Spread as impressionist painting
Brush-strokes approximate truth.
Five senses are country and soul
That see everything, include ears
And beauty of a liberating smell,
Skin ex-foliated and sporting red.
Medicine for skin is a soul search.
The heart is sensual as eyes break
A poet recalled, a beauty sonnet.
(Reference is to a Dylan Thomas poem When all my five and
country senses see)
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: senses
25
Paddy
We had gone in a mudtrack
Between the fields sporting
Paddy shoots in fresh slush.
Women feet were sure there.
There was rain on the night.
Women might have been there.
Their tongues might have rung
Like fevered bells in mouths
Singing their sowing songs.
Songs might have gone sad,
When skies were soon empty.
There was not enough slush
To go around for the paddy,
With common legs drowned
Not even up to their ankles.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: paddy
26
Bricks
By night bricks build on our hopes
To feed our desires on wet pillows
Soaked in dreams of rain coming.
No rain is no need for a noon snack
Under a scorched earth and onion
To go with a bowl of rice porridge,
Among the cotton soldiers of field
Imitating clouds barren with rain.
Bricks are way to build rain shelters
Above us , when rain plays truant.
Our childrens feet play brick slush
And women hang babies by trees.
Our heads now bear blood-red bricks
Made of the same earth that used
To spring cotton like white clouds .
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: bricks
27
Binary
The two-timing goes on by the man
With woman, exploring woman issue
In bitter pillow fights acted between
Woman carving existence for herself
And other, who has done it already.
There are no bad women,only other.
All that thing is man-woman in soap
A binary song ,two bodies in conflict.
Man of woman is at conflict with her
Because the woman wants that way
After a long haul of domestic chores
A bitch session about other women
Doing it,to forget the other conflict,
The twang of inherent male violence
Man staking claim to original home
A breakaway trying to enter her womb.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: binary
28
Memory is to forget
Our forgetting is a purely digital thing
About having many gigabytes of cloud
A cloud not on our faces but on bodies
Like on far off hills under passing cloud.
The shreds do not rain at all, only cast
Their shadow for change and pass off.
On clear days, cloud memory is escape
From rain, from monsoon celebration
Shirking from responsibility for action
When the rain raga shall be overplayed
And the peacocks shall strut their stuff.
A vast memory is recipe for forgetting
A memory that stays all night in clouds
The tatters that pile up beyond the hills
But do not wet parched lands this side.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: memory is to forget
29
Inside snake
We have always been afraid
Of snakes but are no longer.
We acutely worry about them
The ones inside us, endlessly,
Not ones roused from sleep.
About table ,where we are laid
Medicine phials are inside out
While a fans electric shadows
Stretch on the purest of walls,
Like old snakes tongue probe.
We fear for our snakes safety
Laid end to end,geographically.
We love our snake much and
Want it back where it belongs.
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: inside snake
30
The leaf fan
Down from a palms tall frond
By a poor mans toddy descent
The leaf-fan stirs a wind about
Our faces that sweat and fret.
Hand fatigues of the same face
Not of the slave faces around
To catch the passing breezes
For a belle under fevered sky.
Man descends from the palm
With leaf for our ribbed fans
For our powerless afternoons.
His face is of erstwhile slaves.
His ribbed chest emits fumes
Of toddy liquor brought down.
(Reference is to John Gays poem The Fan)
Filed under: a poem a day by A.J.Rao Tagged: the leaf fan