1
At times it happens
That pen touches paper
And the stars leap up but the dew stays where it is.
Encircling the verdure flowing in leaf-veins
Are thirsty particles of sunlight,
Crowding around like a herd of deer.
Ink changes into peacock plumage,
White turns into a mirror,
And ancestral faces glow in the mirror,
Clad in the laughter and dust
Of children at hopscotch;
The sleeping snow-covered beauty levitates;
A chance digit turns into a birth date
And lights up the sky
With Diwali sparklers,
Like a magician's wand.
After the camera-flash
The primal dark whirls around in
Fiery concentrics;
The descending dark is pierced by tracer bullets
Which turn into doves at the mumbled
Mention of the divine.
You get lost in the black and white
Of hide-and-seek;
Yet you suddenly find
What memory had lost;
Love on a garden bench
Turns eternal in a rose-trellised window,
In a bed of jasmine
Ending up in a garlanded picture frame
Of sandalwood hanging on the wall.
Fingernails grow
Wrinkles deepen
The forehead recedes
Vision turns dim
And the self is not visible.
Truth that had slipped from the hand
And been dragged across the sea-floor,
Returns like a ship with twelve sails
Bulging in the wind,
And cutting through the rushing tide.
Don't forget then
That this is the magic of poetry
And stars, dew, seasons, truth, falsehood, love
And paintings by the blind
And dances by the limbless
And dwarves plucking fruit from tall trees
Are mere jugglery.
If you allow yourself to be mesmerised thus,
It is the end and the curtain comes down.

Lifting the curtain, poetry beckons
The one who has stayed sitting even after the play is over
Without having applauded,
And introduces him to the words
Engaged in the exercises behind the curtain.

Who, apart from words -
Uncut, desireless, purposeless, weightless, homeless words -
Will join the unending bankrupt drama company of poetry,
To be needlessly abused and destroyed?

2
Poetry was once preserved in song and dance.
Some used to grumble even then:
"Why this convoluted cacophony? Why not speak straight?"
When writing emerged there was a scream:
"Gone is the music of sound coiling inside the ears -
and now these twisted strokes spiking vision."
With hammer and chisel young poets transfixed
the torrents of their inspiration on stones,
and carried, hearts pounding, the lithic manuscripts to the critic.
"Ah, stones are written into my fate,"
groaned the critic's wife.
During seasonal cleaning of the house
she would exchange the heavy stone-slabs of poetry
for light kitchen pottery from junk shops.
(Calling out, "Catch!" the editors would hurl rejected manuscripts.
The poets had to be wary like hunted hares.
You can also imagine the din in Stone Age mushairas.)
Even now some of these slabs turn up
from palace plinths, fort turrets and temple walls.

Travelling distances when not honoured in his home
or when exiled for offending priest or prince,
conveniently moulding history doused in blood,
poetry had to be carried in clandestine baggage.
So poets started writing on leaves.
The stone-worshipping prophet-poets
with ashen brows and beards thundered from the mountains:
"How many trees will be denuded by these avant garde sinners?"
They wouldn't have dreamt of the arrival of paper,
on which ink would dribble from the quill like blood.

Pouring his sorrow out on paper, a poet
would exclaim with joy, "Oh my God! What have I done!"
and proudly affix his signature.
While aware of ambiguities inherent in words
another would declare without signing
"These words are not mine, holding my fingers, Allah has traced them."
And cackling with laughter the Devil erupted as the printing press.
How can there be anything authentic
in a script where the letters are captive to the Devil?
What happens to the poet's own curvaceous calligraphy,
the eagerness obvious in his sketchy scribble,
the innocence with regard to spelling and syntax?
From this mess of printed poems
how do we unearth the face of the poet?

Still poetry continued to be penned and printed
in aperiodic tabloids, little magazines, weighty journals, newspapers
slyly from the underground, brazenly in markets,
in wars against slavery and poverty
rebellions against whiskered or knock-kneed tyrants,
from scaffolds, facing firing squads, petrified in gas chambers,
in penny cinemasong booklets, street corner notice boards, parliaments
from the stinking maws of bearded ogres,
or expectations of the bald,
in the shifty strips at the bottom of television screens.
Poetry is LOST, LOST, LOST -
one hears such cries every day.

And yet plugging his ears,
clenching his pen between his teeth,
with elbows holding the paper close to his chest
the poet strives to rise again
and before him looms
the computer.