Month: Jul 2020

Posted on in Ballad Monger

Death along a highway

It wasn’t long, 

before the midday sun 

glinted like pools of water,

along the coal tar road…

 

And then newer patches

of modern industry …

haphazardly connected roads

sewn together like pressed staples.

 

Incoherently; perhaps a myriad contractors

trying to communicate with each other

and never quite a straight path.

Years in the making and not there yet.

 

At a lonely stretch

alongside the massive divider

a tiny bony frame swaddled in a maroon sari

darkened further by the relentless sun.

 

How did she get there?

Was she riding pillion and fell?

Or was she hitching a ride?

And fell across the divider?

 

Perhaps the person/s with her 

needed no further encumbrances

so they left her there,

as testament to an unfinished road…

As seen enroute from Hampi to Goa; along the new highway that is being constructed piecemeal, for the past few years.

Posted on in Ballad Monger

The green exists because I see

IMG_20200701_112705

It’s a long while to dusk
And I ponder what is real…
Neuroscientists assure me
That reality is a construct of
my carefully woven perceptions
Projected onto the mirror of
what then grafts … onto my consciousness
I identify green not because it exists
but because I contrive to see it
In the breathtaking blazing hues,
In commingling viridescence at the arboretum…

The humpback whale on screen
A neocortex rivalling and surpassing Man’s…
Man is free diving in the shallows of a Cerulean Sea
A whale sinuously weaving her way around his bony frame
He rests belly up…
She mirrors him, thrilled to play
The size, the size, it’s incongruous
These exertions
Is this her reality
The play, the zest, the heat
What thrills her mammalian heart I wonder
What kindness drives her actions?

Does she see, feel, play, or…
does she see, interpret, contrive an action
Where does this emanate from?

The heart brooks no tales
It’s only more inscrutable than
the legitimate valves and muscles that comprise it.

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I find it incredibly humbling to see how a creature as gigantic as the humpback whale can make such compassionate allowance for a creature as insignificant and small as man. The irony here too is the difference in species.