Gift: Poem

 

 

Material gifts vanish away
usurped by the sands of time
I want my presents to stay
until you’re old and grey

I plant kernels of advice
Oars to steer your discourse
as you wheel through change

I freeze joy in a photo collage
Your living room now
a stroll down memory lane

I paint an intricate tattoo
Splash of your personality
a permanent reminder

I lift you with an adventure sport
Existential questions forgotten
Once in a lifetime experience

I wrap you in a novel culture
steal you for far travel
Check off your bucket list

I encase you in a playlist
Borrowed words and tunes
for your every mood

I warm you with sweet praise
a song of truth heard long after
the last note is done

I surrender you to a skill
Turns your world topsy-turvy
you are now a new man

When all is said and done
I gift you this poem
In that, I gift you myself.

 

What is an absolutely amazing gift that you’ve received? I’m curious to know. Comment below. 

 

Tanka #4

 

 

Clouds check reflection

Green reaches to touch the white

Rocks drenched in cold bath

Brown mounds rise tall- Mountains break

into thunderous applause!

Religion

You ask me to seek the Lord in a distant temple on a faraway hill, a herculean climb, convincing me that I can please God only with the pain of my labour.

You demarcate places of worship to fuel the fire of exclusion and build walls to serve casteist and anti-woman agendas.

Can’t I find him in the sanctuary of my own devout heart? Didn’t you say He was Omnipotent?

You discriminate the disabled, reassuring me that their past birth karma has earned them their troubles.

Religion is your tool to make me feel ashamed of my festive womanhood.

You assert that my flamboyant sins would weaken the Lord. Didn’t you say He was Omnipotent?

You cloak yourself in the Just World phenomenon. Tit for tat.

You refuse to believe that life isn’t always fair.

Instead, you fancy that the Omniscient above holds weighing scales and strict calculators of Virtue and Vice.

Believe what you will. Worship a stone as the mighty lord, or elevate a philosopher or a God-man to an all-powerful entity.

Let me believe what I choose to. Don’t force your rigid rules and hidden agendas on me.

If you try to contain religion in a matchbox, it’ll combust and set you aflame.

 

Author’s note:

I’m a firm theist and this is more of a critique on the deliberate misuse of institutionalized religion, especially through beliefs and practices perpetrated in the Indian context, where there is no healthy distance between the State and Religion. For me, religion is very personal and pure and it is gut-wrenching to see it contaminated by underhand schemes for epistemological, economic and political power. 

 

 

The Sunshine Blogger Award

An ardent thank you to Mary Mangee for honouring me with my first award. You can check out her wonderful blog at https://dailydosesdotlife.wordpress.com/

The rules are:

• • • Thank the person who nominated you and provide a link back to him/her.
    • Answer the 11 questions provided by the blogger who nominated you.
    • Nominate 11 other bloggers and ask them 11 new questions.
    • Notify the nominees by commenting on one of their blog posts.
    • List the rules and display the Sunshine Blogger Award logo on your post.

   

 

• To pay it forward, I’m thrilled to nominate some of my favourite blogs on WordPress:

Artiche
The Kettle Clicks
Poetpas
Astral Altruist
The corner of Juan
eMAGINE
Voyage des Mots
Inkmythoughts
Satyen
The Light in Me
Daninmaya

Here are the questions I was asked to answer:

1.  What is your favourite fruit?

Mango

2.  Are you religious or spiritual?

I’m certainly more spiritual than religious

3.  Name 3 of your favourite things.

Learning new things, Dancing and Writing

4.  Would you call your eating habits healthy?  Explain

I’m a pernickety eater, so I tend to avoid a lot of junk food. I eat tons of fruits and vegetables. So, yeah, I’d call my eating habits reasonably healthy.

5. Who would you consider to be your hero?

I find it dangerous to glorify one person and put them on a pedestal. I love taking daily doses of strength from everyone and everything around me.

6.  What is your favourite book?

There are too many. Some of my all-time favourites include The God of small things, The Colour Purple, Shadow of the Wind, The Power of Habit, Everyday and Tuesdays with Morrie.

7.  What is your highest level of formal education?

I’ve done a triple major in Communication and Media Studies, Literature and Psychology for my U.G.

8.  What part of the world are you from?

India

9.  Who in your life has been the most influential?

Same as Q 5. A lot of people have touched my life in small, beautiful ways.

10.  Explain one defining moment in your life.

When I chose to leave my hometown and study in another state, that was a defining moment in terms of the change of perspective that it offered.

11.  When overwhelmed, what is your go-to?

There’s nothing music, me-time and a warm shower can’t cure.

 

I pose the following questions to my nominees :

1. As a kid, what did you aspire to become?

2. Share one item on your bucket list.

3. If you could trade lives for a day with a character from a book/film/cartoon, who’d you pick?

4. What’d be the title of your memoir?

5. If you could own only three objects, what’d they be?

6. What’s one piece of advice you’ve given/gotten that’s been a game-changer?

7. What’s your guilty pleasure?

8. What’s something a lot of people like but you don’t?

9. If you were a product, what’d be your slogan?

10. Name a secret talent you have and the most useless talent you have.

11. What’s your absolute favourite thing about yourself? ( Brag away :P)

Before signing off, I’d like to request my nominees and readers to make time to encourage the myriad wonderful blogs that haven’t received the attention they deserve. Do leave likes and comments on blogs with less than five likes/follows. I try to do that every day. We all know that it’s not necessarily smooth in the beginning. Thank you. Have the happiest Sunday! 😀

Morning miracle: Poem

The sky blinks back dregs of sleep

Clouds stretch to the call of dawn

Rocks join hands in prayer

Waves link arms in anticipation

They wait, with bated breath

for the bringer of rapture

The sun arrives amidst fanfare

Spreads out its wings with grace

A salute to its awestruck watchers

A lone man in a distant terrace

behind the lens of his eyes

wonders why there’s none

to witness this miracle

If only he knew the truth

Bird rights: Poem

 

 

The gift of another day
I take flight
Zip through the dawn chorus
my friends Robin and Sparrow
greet me with innate tunes
Clouds hover over
early umbrellas to shield me
from the sun’s elation
I wink at the winds
that carry my wings
Greet sunbeams in my way
with a cheeky whistle
I rip through the air
Empyrean. Elated. Evanescent.

I miss my pen pal
the African Cape Vulture
I get no post from the
American Bald Eagle either
Their words buried with them
I seek my human friends
and wish to carry my tunes
into their weary hearts
With Polarised light
as my navigation compass
I whiz diagonally into
a mis-engineered pylon
Earth wire electrocutes me
and all my tomorrows

My human friends term
entertainment, animal meat,
natural resource, electricity
and a gazillion things
as their sworn birth rights
But, tell me, human
What about my bird rights?
– A dead bird writes

Civil war: Poem

I looked through the window
Birds chirp beckoningly
Scent of morning air wafts
I can almost taste
crisp grass blades
Skipping children, booming adults
gossip, sipping hot coffee
Brotherhood is in the air
I cherish the songworthy city

I wake up from my dream
I look through the window
Songs of the dawn are
sirens and shrieks
the stench of blood reeks
I taste sheer panic
a family divided by distrust
drenched in gas canisters

Air strikes are pikes
to the eager heart
Barrel bombs leave no
scope for a fresh start
Secret police turned traitors
Snipers beleaguered my street
I’m a one-man army, weaponless

Battle lines are unmoved
much like political aspirations
and cultural prejudice
that cost innocent lives
I wail for the broken city
Homes turned into rumbles
No brothers, only rebels

I look through the window
I see nothing
Darkness has come for us
I want to return to the dreams
but I can’t find my sleep

Rainbow unicorn: Poem

Acrostic

 

Violet wisdom, a robe of regality

Indigo eyes blaze, iridescent

Blue melancholy mangled to mush

Green touch makes barren fertile

Yellow laughter, a solicited ringtone

Orange aura, an emblem of sunbeams

Red will and vigour, a Rainbow unicorn hither.

Picnic: Poem

Racing on bikes

followed by a hike

led us to a deck

Made for an overnight stay

resisting technology’s sway

Sleeping bags for pretend camp

Tens of candles luminous

Green grass serenaders

Munching light meals

having real conversations

the sky an eavesdropper

the breeze a lyre to our lyric

Unwrapping ourselves

in the wraps of nature

Noise of time lost on us

Until sunrise

the party pooper

 

Handicap: Tanka

Possessive you are

Own people like property

Blinders mar your sight

You lose what was never yours

Though well-formed you’re still crippled