There is a humility in art,
Where simplicity plays its part.
There is an excitement
Of primordial sensations,
Solubility and Insolubility of textures,
And the sublime fluid,
Of deconstructions.

Its’ menace haunts,
A View in the Dark.
The forms are stolid.
Black and stark.

Beyond Black is where
The hues play Hide ‘n’ Seek.
Surfacing,
Resurfacing,
Diving headlong,
Into the absence of a peak.

The smudge and the smog,
In the dizziness of Desire,
Are the nuances of a beige fog,
Perturbed in a Vertical Blue retire.

All the lines ******,
As they refuse to talk,
Questioning the lingering persuasion,
Of the eyes that stalk.

The dawn silence
Answers in a luxuriant red,
When rebellious strokes,
Keep dancing on that fiery bed.


Fragments keep coalescing into a whole,
It pulsates against the senses,
This Illusion of the soul.

This song is bright,
Even in the absence of light,
The Song of Silence,
Portrays an indomitable might.


The Mirage looks back,
Like every familiar stranger,
The unsettling Rejoicing Red,
Such impacts can auger.


Blossom in dark,
Through Dark and Deep,
Rhythm of tones,
A View in a Dream.
Alone breathes the Isolated Red,
As The Melodies in Grey
Resonate
What the Resonance of Blues
Had left unsaid.


There is a bucolic symmetry,
A revelling immortal mystery,
In The Meditative Silence,
Of
Gopi Gajwani

A River
In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,
every summer
a river dries to a trickle
in the sand,
baring the sand ribs,
straw and women’s hair
clogging the watergates
at the rusty bars
under the bridges with patches
of repair all over them
the wet stones glistening like sleepy
crocodiles, the dry ones
shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun
The poets only sang of the floods.

He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.

The new poets still quoted
the old poets, but no one spoke
in verse
of the pregnant woman
drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
kicking at blank walls
even before birth.

He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
and then
it carries away
in the first half-hour
three village houses,
a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies,
with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.
                                                          ­                                                                 ­          ~A.K.Ramanujan