A SONG OF TIME

A SONG OF TIME

A blue lake glimmers

The shadow of the hill descends,

Lightly, ever so slightly, in the lake,

And time glides without a sound

As I enter your sleepy town.

Your night stirs with ripples of the quiet unrest.

You don’t know me, an alien in your quiet town.

A full moon night, streaming light,

And the clouds are hastening over the ridge,

A pageant of purple, stealing across your sky

And putting out the light on my path;

I am poised for the flight.

It’s a steep ascent.

Evening shadows lengthen across; are swallowed by the voluptuous dark,

And your city is aroused one by one as the lights emerge.

Everything lights up: the shadows that play in the blades of grass,

The silhouettes of skeletal trees against the softly darkened mist.

Your mansion comes in view against a craggy hill;

Every window a casement of distant glow,

And light breaks out quietly,

Once again, another day,

Of gold and grey

Is sliding in the canopy of your sky.

The song that time sang

Has come to an end too soon.

A solitary black swan

Swims in the stillness of my heart,

The stillness of the lake,

A fugitive bird of the water and the sky

Beating a retreat

Before the armies of the day

Begin to invade the spaces of a bohemian  wanderlust.

Sushama Karnik (c)

 NEITHER THE SUN NOR THE MOON

The moment of wakefulness before the sleep begins;

A plain of the sun where no shadow falls,

A plain of the moon where nothing filters

The light of the celestial beings.

Something slips out of hands.

A solitary bird watches and does not speak.

The branch gives way;

The fear recedes;

A welcome spring

Is waiting to receive.

The remnants fall without being seen

With nothing to hold, nothing to let go,

And nothing to happen in between.

A lull, a silence, a primordial sleep,

An occurrence that signals nothing,

An overpowering conquest begins.

Nothing can obstruct the invasion of sleep.

The mind a ceaseless ground of constructs and fall,

The heart, the timorous companion that hides and seeks,

The memory, a witness to the imprints of history’s timeless footprints;

They are all billowing waves, left behind,

And that is the dawn when no sun rises,  no moon shines.

July 25, 2015
(c) Sushama Karnik