I come from a musical place
Where they shoot me for my song
And my brother has been tortured
By my brother in my land.
I come from a beautiful place
Where they hate my shade of skin
They don't like the way I pray
And they ban free poetry.
......
And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
......
WE sat together at one summer's end,
That beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.
Better go down upon your marrow-bones
And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones
Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather;
For to articulate sweet sounds together
......
Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops
De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots
Dis poetry is designed fe rantin
Dance hall style, big mouth chanting,
Dis poetry nar put yu to sleep
Preaching follow me
Like yu is blind sheep,
Dis poetry is not Party Political
Not designed fe dose who are critical.
Dis poetry is wid me when I gu to me bed
......
fox
who
can blame her for hunkering
into the doorwells at night,
the only blaze in the dark
the brush of her hopeful tail,
the only starlight
her little bared teeth?
......
Poetry,
you are—
the atoms of the cosmic yajna,
from which
the world is born.
You are—
the drops of water,
flowing
through the rivers
......
(quatrain trilogy)
CARPE DIEM
Seize the Day when you go out to earn;
Grasp the Hour before passing minutes fade.
Capture the Moment, powerless to return.
Do Your Best Always; earn what you are paid.
FREE LOVE
You may give Love freely,
......
Two doors open—
one flat on a sandy hill,
mine beneath a flickering light,
like a dying eye.
We step through,
and the tearing begins—
the skin of the world,
the brittle edge that held us in,
and kept us apart.
......
Maybe too complex to be defined by words,
Smiles so bright that hides the misery.
Maybe too deep to be understood,
An open book yet still a mystery.
Maybe the sentence unread by readers,
Always the poet, never the poetry.
-Aditi Hayaran (Larkspur)
Color me slowly,
lilac mist across my face—
the hush of dusk before I go.
Let soft sky blue gather
across my chest,
a quiet kind of silence
like a cloudless day
hiding me,
like a secret that lingers.
......