Long Afternoon At The Edge Of Little Sister Pond

चलना और स्थिरता by Neha 

As for life,
I’m humbled,
I’m without words
sufficient to say

how it has been hard as flint,
and soft as a spring pond,
both of these
and over and over,

and long pale afternoons besides,
and so many mysteries
beautiful as eggs in a nest,
still unhatched

though warm and watched over
by something I have never seen –
a tree angel, perhaps,
or a ghost of holiness.

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective.
It suffices, it is all comfort –
along with human love...

**********************

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled —
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing —
that the light is everything — that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

- Mary Oliver

Ye Khayal Accha Hai

बूगनबेल by Neha 

Aur bazaar se le aaye agar toot gayaa
Saagar-e-Jam se mera jaam-e-sifaal achaa hai

unke dekhe se jo aa jaati hai munh par raunaq,
woh samajhtey hain ke beemaar ka haal achaa hai

dekhiye  paate hain  ushshaaq buton se kya faiz,
ik brahman ne kaha hai, ke yeh saal achaa hai

ham ko ma.alūm hai jannat kī haqīqat lekin
dil ke ḳhush rakhne ko 'ġhālib' ye ḳhayal achaa hai

- Mirza Ghalib

A Speech at the Lost-and-Found

- Wislawa Szymborska, Map, Collected and Last Poems

The Secret

Tabiir by Neha 

Two girls discover  
the secret of life  
in a sudden line of  
poetry.

I who don’t know the  
secret wrote  
the line. They  
told me

(through a third person)  
they had found it
but not what it was  
not even

what line it was. No doubt  
by now, more than a week  
later, they have forgotten  
the secret,

the line, the name of  
the poem. I love them  
for finding what  
I can’t find,

and for loving me  
for the line I wrote,  
and for forgetting it  
so that

a thousand times, till death  
finds them, they may  
discover it again, in other  
lines

in other  
happenings. And for  
wanting to know it,  
for

assuming there is  
such a secret, yes,  
for that  
most of all.

- Denise Levertov

Star-gazer

Miniature, India, Bundi,18th century

Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the unwonted sight
Of those almost intolerably bright
Holes, punched in the sky, which excited me partly because
Of their Latin names and partly because I had read in the textbooks
How very far off they were, it seemed their light
Had left them (some at least) long years before I was.

And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive
To run from side to side in a late night train
Admiring it and adding noughts in vain.

- Louis Macneice

Mera Pata (My Address)

Sky in by Neha

Aaj main apne ghar da number mittaiyan hai /
Today I have erased the number of my house

Te gali de matthe de lagaa gali da naam hataaiya hai/
And removed the stain of identity from my street’s forehead

Te har sadak di disha da naam punjh ditta hai/
And I have wiped off the directions on each road

Par je tussa mainu zaroor labhna hai/
But if you really want to meet me

Ta har des de, har sheher di, har gali da booha thakoro /
Then knock at the doors of every country, every city, every street

Ih ik sraap hai, ik var hai/
This is a curse, a blessing. 

Te jitthe vi sutantar rooh di jhalak paavey /
And wherever the glimpse of a free spirit exists
.
........samajhna uh mera ghar hai /
Understand that as my home. 

- Amrita Pritam

Ode to Dirt

Spring Canvas by Neha

Dear dirt, I am sorry I slighted you,
I thought that you were only the background
for the leading characters—the plants
and animals and human animals.
It’s as if I had loved only the stars
and not the sky which gave them space
in which to shine. Subtle, various,
sensitive, you are the skin of our terrain,
you’re our democracy. When I understood
I had never honored you as a living
equal, I was ashamed of myself,
as if I had not recognized
a character who looked so different from me,
but now I can see us all, made of the
same basic materials—
cousins of that first exploding from nothing—
in our intricate equation together. O dirt,
help us find ways to serve your life,
you who have brought us forth, and fed us,
and who at the end will take us in
and rotate with us, and wobble, and orbit.

—Sharon Olds

Lightly, Lightly, Ever so Lightly

Lis by Neha 

Lightly, lightly, ever so lightly
A wind passes so lightly
And dies away, ever so lightly
And I know not what I think
Nor do I try to know

- Albero Careiro ( Fernando Pessoa), Translators - E. Honig, S.M.Brown, Translations. Spring, `999

The poem is a temple

-  Upstream by Mary Oliver 

The lost thought

Orientation by Neha

I felt a cleaving in my mind
        As if my brain had split;
I tried to match it, seam by seam,
       But could not make them fit.

The thought behind I strove to join
       Unto the thought before, ,
But sequence ravelled out of reach
        Like balls upon a floor.

- Emily Dickinson

The house was quiet and the world was calm

La lettrice in abito viola by Henri Matisse 

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

- Wallace Stevens, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

A Work Of Artifice

Penzai (penjing) on a mural (706 CE) — in the Tang Dynasty tomb of Prince Li Xian, Wiki Commons

The bonsai tree

in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.

- Marge Piercy

The Dream Keeper

The Gladioli Les Glaïeuls 1 by Marc Chagall 

Bring me all of your dreams,
You dreamers,
Bring me all your
Heart melodies
That I may wrap them
In a blue cloud-cloth
Away from the too-rough fingers
Of the world.

- Langston Hughes

The heart asks pleasure first

Untitled Self Portrait by Amrita Sher-Gil

The heart asks pleasure first
And then, excuse from pain-
And then, those little anodynes
That deaden suffering;

And then, to go to sleep;
And then, if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor,
The liberty to die.

- Emily Dickinson

Thy fingers make early flowers

Violet Robe and Anemone by Henri Matisse

Thy fingers make early flowers
of all things.
thy hair mostly the hours love:
a smoothness which
sings, saying
(though love be a day)
do not fear,we will go amaying.

thy whitest feet crisply are straying.
Always
thy moist eyes are at kisses playing,
whose strangeness much
says; singing
(though love be a day)
for which girl art thou flowers bringing?

To be thy lips is a sweet thing
and small.
Death, thee i call rich beyond wishing
if this thou catch,
else missing.
(though love be a day
and life be nothing, it shall not stop kissing).

- e e cummings

What Have I Ever Lost By Dying?

Portrait IV, 1938 by Joan Miro

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a mineral,

And then I died and was reborn as a plant.

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as a plant,

And then I died and was reborn as an animal.

I lived for hundreds of thousands of years as an animal,
And then I died and was reborn as a human being.

What have I ever lost by dying?

- Rumi ( version by Robert Bly) 

Mysteries, Yes

Umbilical Creeper Carpet by A.Ramachandran 

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

- Mary Oliver

A Dream Within a Dream

Haze by Neha

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

- Edgar Allan Poe

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

- Rumi

It felt love

Universe by Neha

How

Did the rose

Ever open its heart

And give this world

All its

Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light

Against its

Being,

Otherwise,

We all remain

Too

Frightened

- Hafiz