Empire forte

Let an empire grow,

Of tender shoots and snow;

From the pores of your forte,

Lying in the rubbles of a fort.

Neighbours in house

They shout as you sleep deep in your shrine

Of banks, of ports…the regular sixty-nines,

Their voice more volatile than your troubled times

They are the Pariahs of known Parliamines!

Like the woods, they’ve taken fire after blows

From outsides and within; On mysteries they know,

On backbones and bellies, that’ve thrown out their ribs

Into a dome of weapons that clatters as you sleep.

You panic, you lineup, you repeat the word nation

That has ever seen you detach your organs, and ration

To become such a neuron, You may not understand

Their ways so cobweb to tell life from the land!

And lives for those lands, as Parliamines change faces

So does its foes, from spinning wheel to bayonet;

“A fence makes good neighbours”, that’s what we all are

Though you may think it as a house, and its members.

If you feel lost

Keep on walking boy

Your steps may falter, still;

The light house is across that bend

Where your captain is waiting for you.

His ship is wedged in the sand,

But it's a matter of tide and hope

To get it back to sailing;

Your captain needs your body

As much you need the compass he owns.

Ropeway from Gandhi to Godhra

Grains of life, I earn from Gulf…

Where once a half-clad saint knew about
Watermarks of wind, in landforms
As beige and broken as conquests.

In faith on time and pressure, saplings he sowed
As empathic as mother’s womb,
And desperate as farmer’s hope for rains,
Cracked a wall that canon balls could not bomb.

***

Grains of life, I earn from Gulf…

Where surf of sea now lashes
Like sword, through fault lines
Larger and deeper than communities.

Vessels sent long back, loom over the horizon again
With barrels of oil, as inflammable as
Hunger for money, and addiction to identity,
To displace those saplings faster and secretive
…than nuclear weapon can.

Peace

Peace that embraces like lover’s arms

The fatigue of battles over pride and reasoning,

Shall scatter like sunshine through turquoise marbles

To lit up the face of a child in the Devil.

Armour that comes your way from Love to lava

Shall wither like clothes between lovers in arms…

When naked and naïve those gypsy wings flutter,

Shunned by norms, in a sky, where rests your palm.

Wood Fossil

I will gift you a history

That the winner hasn’t written for a change

And others will not tell other stories in days to come.

Only time will know how gaps collapse

As we grow upon each other like wood and grass;

Although we won’t touch each other in the sense wood does

But more like pages of a novel.

And even if the heavy storms dust

Fossil that becomes, will have a thousand stories saved.

Nuclear

What can be more nuclear

Than houses, light-years apart within?

Than a hypnotic light behind our eyes

How real have shadows been!

Than dying words on scattered isles

Fusing them in a sleepy sea…

What can be more nuclear

Than knowing you, and knowing me?