Words are floating in the air like
Dragonflies in summer.
They reflect on placid waters
Only ruffled by the silver fins of tiny fish.
They dangle ripe and tantalizing
From the brambles growing by the train tracks.
They soar and cartwheel in the azure sky.

Words are lurking in the shadowed places
In the forests of emotion, and the dells
Where sunshine is a seldom visitor.
They tumble like a child’s balloon
Down waterfalls of jubilation.
They pounce like kittens from the top of cabinets.
They curl up in a mother’s lap.

Words can be illusive as a chimera
So difficult to capture in a pen,
And once ensconced, impossible to lure back out.
Words are currency to purchase immortality -
To bargain with the vicissitudes of life
And bandage wounds of disappointment.
They build a wall and often hide behind it.

Words are letters rearranged a million times.
The songs of living, loving, laughing life.
They can be the voice of brilliant minds,
The moans of breaking hearts and souls,
The sigh that sounds the same in every tongue,
The cry to God when all else fails,
The one true tool that separates us from the Apes.
ljm

In my yard stands a tree
tall and sturdy
lone like a hermit,
regal like an empress
her roots dug deep
her branches touching the heavens
peeking behind the skies veil
She has a coy dalliance with the Wind
Sometimes he comes tickling
her tender parts, whispering
sweet nothings in her ear
Overall she is still
Still....................
like waters without ripples

She stands upright
brooding over the saga of struggle
from a sapling to a towering giant
Indeed a tryst with destiny!

Under the summer sky
braving the smarting beams
she remained uncomplaining.
Below the thundering clouds
bearing a thousand needle ******
she stayed nonchalant.
When the wind swept across
bending her branches in all directions
she stood on firm feet unwavering.

She tells a tale of struggle and survival
She had stood there before I was born
Now she displays every scar and every stripe
on her knotted bark as a proud trophy

Sometimes I feel her pain
when wet and dripping in pouring rain
or scorched in the sun’s fiery rage
Yet she holds an umbrella over all
who come to her in sun and rain

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of summer shines;
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade'
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
       So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
       So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Julys have come and gone
in the hills of Shillong
and from the browned ORWO
the skinny boy with an oversized cap
smiles as if there's no tomorrow
but this moment
wrapped in fog and drizzle
holds everything within
the now filling life to the brim
making growth a needless shape
absurdly redundant
and never more real
than the eyes
peering from that shot of time
ecstatic in happiness
rejecting a future
too intangible
to be valuable.