Pilgrim's Progress

A Writer’s Prayer
 (2nd Prize winner of The Indian Poetry Society-British Council Contest. Dedicated to Celia and perhaps one of the finest pieces I have ever written.)

Let my words have an unvarnished feel to them. Truth writ in the grain. Sentences that feel like bark and offer comfort like a bench after a long walk into the hills with a woman.

Let my words have the clearness of a stream - the seeing pebbles look. The kind through which you reach and pick a water smooth pebble. Or better still cupped in both hands, its icy coolness splashed on a sweaty face and arms dewed with a laughing run up a summery slope.

Let my words have a good taste to them, like warm stew ladled with loving arms, brown-gold as loaves snoring-soft in a basket weaved hither-thither with sentences and bible rhythms and the warm taste of grace.

Let my words smell like the tenderness of a woman's breast or a cupped hand raised gently, its fleshy plumpness to nostrils trembling as a race horse's might. Or let the words breathe of iron-hot clothes, or a leather saddle, or a table being waxed by the arms of the carpenter.

Let my words sound like a lullaby, rocking my child in its syllables rippling like gentle waves in an ocean with no shores.

Falling Upwards
Sometimes I lie down on a stone bench in the park
and look down at the sky,
and I think if I let go I'll fall like a leaf
past the trees and slow into the clouds 
and through the deep whispering blue.
Sometimes a hawk slides
slow from the pool of one eye to another
and not a seam.

Sometimes there's the trees and I.
Sometimes I am the stone bench, sun-warm and lazy.

Sometimes the eucalyptus scent-blown shivering.
Sometimes I lie down on a stone bench in the park
and look down at the sky,
and I let go and I fall like a leaf
past the trees and slow into the sky
and through the deep whispering blue.

(This piece is a meditation. Based on an experience I had in the mid 1990's. Safe only for adepts.)

The Pilgrimage to the Newspaper Stall

The stroll to buy newspapers on Sunday
is a pilgrimage.

Light suffuses the stairs,
gold suffuses the light,
steps awaken the cells.

The neem tree in the car park
is a shock,
on some Sundays, it's a cathedral,
sending out an intense calm,
deep like a needle into the veins of the soul.

Each step of light is on light.
The solid earth is light – cool, underwater, cloudy.
Stars. Symbols. Words of silence.
A grammar of being.

Mind, sharp – a little hungover,
separating body mind step word.
each step to the gate is inward.
The gate challenges.
Can you walk among the stars?
And cross the road?

The Milky Way and M.G.Road
are cousins.
Coming to the divider
In-focus shifting a trifle,
not shifting.

I reach the sanctuary of the other side.
Muddy, slushy, dug up.
And yet the eyes show a rich reveling
in its being.

Is there any place where God isn't?
I judge the trench,
leap across, hop across, step across.
A goat, not a goat.
A million participations in each cell.
The creepers tumbling over the wall,
spill over the walls of my being.
I breathe out. And in.

Rivers of thought.
A star symbol which
has been playing hide and seek
for the last few weeks
rises like the fish of wisdom.

“They are souls”
the words form to me
in reminder.

Someone picks a stone
And hits the scooter of a friend.

I pick the papers.
Four.

There's an eclipse on the front page.
The shopkeeper is bald.
There's a complicity, an understanding,
A pact.

How do I enter into his life?
A symbol of, who knows what, on Sunday mornings.
I walk away.

I look at a temple tree.

It looks back at me.

(This piece has been published by WordPool in the mid 1990's, a pioneering esite in India.)

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*Kundalini Rising.
*Awakenings: Welcoming The Joy.
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*Rules of Life.
*Homeland

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