Dear Author:
I am posting
your 'the-then' thoughts
on this web-blog
since I do not know
where, in time
and in place
are you lost.

If,
someday,
you happen to stumble
upon this web-page,
send me a message
and I will quietly
remove this entry
in exchange
for a small fee:
The privileged readership
of your soul-stirring poetry.

❀

WE ALWAYS REMEMBER

You and I,
wherever we are
are fated to love.

No matter
whose poems are being read,
You and I,
or something of us
springs up in each one
in some way or
another.


Whatever doesn't ever
reach the lips
has reached the poems
...already...already.

There,
Do you blink?
as if to disillusion me.

You talk of bright worlds ;
unknown to me.

My side of the discourse
is limited to sighs and tears
and blushes,
and wiping off
the spreading Kaajal †
with my baby's mouth-napkin.

But you aren't even married yet.

And
by the next time we meet,
I will have painted my lips again.

You remind me
of what I couldn't be.


© The Nightingale

† Kohl

You were a tree.

Not too short but not surpassingly lanky.
The foliage wasn’t thick either
and yet not scrimpy enough
to make the tree look shorn or deciduous.

Ample light passed through the leaves.
The elements were temperate,
neither sultry, nor betraying a freeze.

It was neither day, nor night,
hard to tell the dark from bright.

There was a placid rustle
as the breeze politely shuffled
across the nubilous chaparral.

I stood there

knowing it is you
and the flowers from the tree were
profuse.

They kept falling on and around me.

She was a beautiful girl
with intense eyes
and long black hair.

We would sit
on the windy cliff
till the Sun
went over the hill,
and
she would sing to me
and talk to me
about life;
that promised to be ours.

Then,
the evening would take
deeper, softer shades
and we would go
our own separate ways
waiting......
for the next day's meeting.

Today,
as I write about
those lively days,
I can still
feel the gaze
of dreamy,
eager eyes
of that beautiful girl
whose life and dreams
oozed away quietly
through the hole
in her heart.

My grandmother had forgotten everything but the ability to be good,
Innate courtliness sitting like a castle upon a moor.
Her world of insensate rains and fogs and heaths,
And still the hearth flickering from her lost eyes.
My grandmother whom I adored, to all the world,
Your goodness will go unnoticed into night,
Just as your eyes stared unknowing
Before the subsuming of tides,
While the world blasted through your bones,
Breath without force of inspiration.

Here, love is the far proxy of look
- She is dying a distance -
Yours travels from brook to sky
To the heaven wanderings of death in my blood,
The black smoke-congested veins possessed
By the baffled realms of battlefield
By the horrors of the mundane
From this old mouth, emptied of kisses.

Thank you,

For the freedom
         For this day
For each night.
And for our freely given rights.

Thank you,

For what you did
              For the day you fell,
For the last breath you had
       And the reason I'm alive.

Thank you,

Even though
   We never meet.
Even though
    I don't know
            your face.

But you are on my mind
On the eleventh month
          Of the eleventh day.

And at this time I bow
My head, every year in
           gratitude & respect.

Noble heritage they cannot erase
Ancestor’s plight laid bare for all to see
Tribal identity etched in each face
Invincible spirit their pedigree
Various attempts meant to “civilize”
Expanding demands for more and more land

Pogroms by forced removal terrorized
Extreme suffering they had to withstand.
Their unshakable resolve saw them through
Providing strength to mitigate their fears
Lives lost, yes, their memory they’ll renew
Endless remembrance of the Trail of Tears.