Colourful friends

I have a friend.

He is black.

I call him Blacky.

Black is not bad

I don’t change him

His colour, with euphemism

For his kin, he’s not sad.

I am Browny; with colours, we don’t fuss

We also have a Whitey with us.

One is fat, one is tall

And one is short

Us, we sometimes call

Tally, Shorty, Fatty

We don’t feel proud, ashamed or dotty.

We don’t make amends

Our looks is given for free

Not how we look, but how we see

Makes us outstanding friends.

One goes to a church

One to a mosque

One to a temple

But we know whom we pray

Lives inside our hearts

Is beyond the fence

And if they ever met

They wouldn’t fight

Like us, they’d simply be friends.

A small poem

Rains...

An urchin draws smileys

On the draining field

The untouchable

The wind has sinned.

It took ink from the sun

Wrote stories on the sky

What appeared as clouds

Became visible with the moon

Daylight is such a lie

Thousand stories

But whose stories are these

Smiling, crying witness.

And where are they placed

Right in front of nowhere.

And how old are they

Light-years, or a day.

In the middle of all these fictions,

The wind, the only indispensable voleur

The uncatchable offender

Perpetually in medias res, yet out of sight

The invincible, pure benefactor

No matter what, unwinds.

Grow up

Wars, a delinquent game, it’s nothing new

With foolish weapons, far from witty

Funny you know that pretty well too

What a joke! You name a cannon Humpty Dumpty*!

Get rid of wars, unleash peace

Before you pull the girl

From her wonderland and call

A weapon as Alice!

Get rid of weapons, unveil prosperity

O adults! Please outgrow Tom and Jerry.

Jokes aside,

In killings there’s no pride.

When you create a weapon

In your mind, a war is born.

When you market a weapon

Death warms up its horns.

We’re ordinary peoples of the world here,

Our troubles don’t seem to end,

We die as martyrs most everywhere,

Wonder when enemies, like adults, could befriend.

Note:

*From 1996 the website of the Colchester tourist board attributed the origin of the rhyme to a cannon recorded as used from the church of St Mary-at-the-Wall by the Royalist defenders in the siege of 1648. In 1648 Colchester was a walled town with a castle and several churches were protected by the city wall. A large cannon, colloquially called Humpty Dumpty, was strategically placed on the wall. A shot from Parliamentary cannon succeeded in damaging the wall beneath Humpty Dumpty which caused the cannon to tumble to the ground.

Source: Wikipedia

Gift

Civilisation’s real change

Is to be free from wars, weapons

Arms and guns,

When intelligence with skill

undoes the need to kill,

when armies shift their focus

enemies for good leave from our hearts,

when insecurities perish

when poverty and hunger vanish.

Rest,

including reaching out to other planets

is gifting a comb

to the tonsured world.

Pride and shame

Pride and shame

Travel in time

Wars

Weapons

In love

Moon

hides behind the gray curtains

thick with tears

I swerve and hold her from behind

Not too sure though

I seize the side as the beyond

with the drape, a groaning mirror

in front of us

I could remember the tailor

...

Holding her

I must have meant a sorry

else how did I receive her warmth

some distance away from the frozen gloom

...

The curtain falls

we are in the dance
performing on the slippery stage

Light and sound

our same world

beholds

Load

You have a long way to go
For you still carry dead words

Warring world

Push the weapons inside places of worship

They need to rest in peace

In mosques, temples,

churches, gurudwaras, synagogues, and in books.

And those persons with unbounded consciousness,

whom for years

we treasured inside the imprisoned boundaries,

Bring them out in the fields, on the streets,

Where they truly belong.

Weapons and the World,

both will be delivered.

We are all Kalidasa

We are all Kalidasa

With weapon, cutting the branch

On which we nest

O Intelligence!

Bless us

so we could relax

and have the good sense

to drop the axe.

Note:

The poem stands on the story of Kalidasa. The legend says that Kalidasa, one of the greatest poets that ever lived in Indian soil, was a fool cutting the branch of a tree he was sitting on with an axe. When he fell on the ground, Saraswati, the Goddess of learning, came to his rescue and gave him a boon, which eventually resurrected him into a poet with an outstanding talent. However, there are many versions of this story. Later, he came to be known as the master of roopak (metaphor) and had authored brilliant novels including Meghadootam, Shakuntalam.