The Word

Where hope lives by Neha

Down near the bottom
 of the crossed-out list
 of things you have to do today,

 between "green thread"
 and "broccoli" you find
 that you have penciled "sunlight."

 Resting on the page, the word
 is as beautiful, it touches you
 as if you had a friend

 and sunlight were a present
 he had sent you from some place distant
 as this morning -- to cheer you up,

 and to remind you that,
 among your duties, pleasure
 is a thing,

 that also needs accomplishing
 Do you remember?
 that time and light are kinds

 of love, and love
 is no less practical
 than a coffee grinder

 or a safe spare tire?
 Tomorrow you may be utterly
 without a clue

 but today you get a telegram,
 from the heart in exile
 proclaiming that the kingdom

 still exists,
 the king and queen alive,
 still speaking to their children,

 - to any one among them
 who can find the time,
 to sit out in the sun and listen.

 - Tony Hoagland

(Poem #1714) Geetanjali

Supermoon by Neha

Obstinate are the trammels, but my heart aches when I try to break them.Freedom is all I want, but to hope for it I feel ashamed.
I am certain that priceless wealth is in thee, and that thou art my best
friend, but I have not the heart to sweep away the tinsel that fills my room
The shroud that covers me is a shroud of dust and death;
I hate it, yet hug it in love.
My debts are large, my failures great, my shame secret and heavy; 
yet when I come to ask for my good, I quake in fear lest my prayer be granted.

-- Rabindranath Tagore

Eurydice

I am not afraid as I descend,
step by step, leaving behind the salt wind
blowing up the corrugated river,

the damp city streets, their sodium glare
of rush-hour headlights pitted with pearls of rain;
for my eyes still reflect the half remembered moon.

Already your face recedes beneath the station clock,
a damp smudge among the shadows
mirrored in the train's wet glass,

will you forget me? Steel tracks lead you out
past cranes and crematoria,
boat yards and bike sheds, ruby shards

of roman glass and wolf-bone mummified in mud,
the rows of curtained windows like eyelids
heavy with sleep, to the city's green edge.

Now I stop my ears with wax, hold fast
the memory of the song you once whispered in my ear.
Its echoes tangle like briars in my thick hair.

You turned to look.
Second fly past like birds.
My hands grow cold. I am ice and cloud.

This path unravels.
Deep in hidden rooms filled with dust
and sour night-breath the lost city is sleeping.

Above the hurt sky is weeping,
soaked nightingales have ceased to sing.
Dusk has come early. I am drowning in blue.

I dream of a green garden
where the sun feathers my face
like your once eager kiss.

Soon, soon I will climb
from this blackened earth
into the diffident light.

- Susan Hubbard

Written On The Body

Whatever is powerful to you can be translated into something which will matter to somebody that you will never know.

All of my books are about boundaries and desire - the boundaries we should try to cross, like fear and class and skin-colour and expectation, and the boundaries that seem to define us, such as our sense of self, our gender. Disease, especially a disease like cancer or aids, breaks down the boundaries of the immune system and forces a new self on us that we often don't recognise. Our territory is eaten away. We are parcelled out into healthy areas and metastasised areas. Parts of us are still whole, too much has been invaded. 

Against this, I wanted to look again, (I am always looking again) at love's ability to shatter and heal simultaneously. Loving someone else destroys our ideas of who we are and what we want. Priorities change, friends change, houses change, we change. Part of the strangeness of being human is our need of boundaries, parameters, definitions, explanations, and our need for them to be overturned. For most people, only the positives of love and faith (and a child is both), or the negatives of disaster and disease, achieve this. Death comes too late. The final shattering affects others, but not ourselves.

- Jeanette Winterson on her book "Written on the body"

Sonnet 116

The Cupboard by Neha

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

- Shakespeare 

Geometry

Circular by Neha

Logic can only go so far
after that I must see-perceive-imagine
This geometry can help
I may reason logically thru theorem
and propositions galore,
but only what I perceive is real.
If after studying I am not changed
if after studying I still see the same
then all has gone for naught.
Geometry is to open up my mind
so I may see what has always been behind
the illusions that time
and space construct.
Space isn’t made of point and line
the points and lines are in the mind.
The physicists see space as curved
with particles that are quite blurred.
And, when I draw, everything is fat
there are no point and that is that.
The artists and the dreamer knows
that space is where an image grows.
For me it’s a sea in which I swim
a formless sea of hope and whim.
Thru my fear on Infinity and One
I structure space to confine
my imagination away from the idea
That all in One.
But, I can from this trap escape
I can see the geometry in which I wander
as but a structure I made to ponder.
I can dare to let fo the structures
and my fears
and look beyond
to see what is always there to see.
But, to let go, I must first grab on.
Geometry is both the grabbing on
and the letting go.
It is a logical structure
and a perceived meaning
Q.E.D.’s and “Oh! I see”’s
It is formal abstractions
and beautiful contraptions.
It is talking precisely about that
Which we know only fuzzily.
But, in the end, and, most of all,
it is seeing-perceiving
The meaning that
I AM.

- David Henderson 

Acceptance

A Pointed Season by Neha

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night bee too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.

- Robert Frost

The Journey - Geetanjali

Belonging by Neha

The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.
I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, 
and pursued my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds 
leaving my track on many a star and planet.
It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, 
and that training is the most intricate 
which leads to the utter simplicity of a tune.
The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own, 
and one has to wander through all the outer worlds 
to reach the innermost shrine at the end.
My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said 'Here art thou!'
The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into tears of a thousand streams
and deluge the world with the flood of the assurance 'I am!'

-XII, Geetanjali, Rabindranath Tagore 

Geetanjali

"The Flight" by Neha

The child who is decked with prince's robes and who has

jeweled chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play;

his dress hampers him at every step.

In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps

himself from the world, and is afraid even to move.

Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keeps one

shut off from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob

one of the right of entrance to the great fair of

common human life.

- Geetanjali, VIII, Rabindranath Tagore 

Sometimes

There can be no disgrace
For the true expression of Love
That without it,
a man can be coarsened and degraded
In mind, body and soul

Oh I've searched it once
But there is no love anywhere
I cannot find love by searching for it
It comes to us unbiden
Then we give it to others

Yes
Would you play something gay
Yes

- From "Hope & Sorrow" by Wax Tailor, Listen on YouTube here.