Taj Mahal in the winter fog
a dream adrift on a frozen plank of ice,
The sublime silence of the river
the cold morning breeze.
The marble domes slowly emerge in view

In the foreground the colors of the garments
of women bending over the stream
dipping the vessels to fill up to the brim,
the blending of the sight and the sound
a miracle was seen on the banks of Jamuna.

Thousands of eyes witnessing a single thought captured in a dream
Thousands of hands working in unison to build a monument in cold stone,
Thousands of people holding their breath, breathing together as a single soul
Every miracle was held together in the space of a single canopy of sky.
And the two women submitted themselves to the task
of filling up the vessels for that day.
The grandeur and the humility!

Originally shared by Sushama Karnik

Nirmal Dhara Neena Dighe

The Sounds Of the Rain

The sounds of rain , so near, and so far...
On the snow capped mountains the ice melts,
the water flows in a silent stream,
and I hear the silence
in the raindrops falling on my window panes.
The rain can hear the silence reigning in my heart.
A slow beat, a plaintive note on a violin string,
stirs as if in the depth of a valley.
A descent from the hills,
the rain has an easy fall.
Down on the friendly slopes
the rain rolls, a child not scared of the fall.
And I am waiting, tremulously, to catch the rain in my arms.
Step by step, sometimes the rain descends
as the massive clouds watch the downhill slopes
until the streams gather and open the floodgates in a drastic wind.
Often in the moonsong, the rain delights.
Like a charmed herd of mountain deer
the rain follows the magic flute,
and like a revelation on an abrupt night
the rain speaks of the mysteries sung to the ears of the maids
waiting for a marriage divine.
The mesmerizing sound of rain
carries the burden of ages of a longing that has remained
pristine, clear like the moonshine of the nights when the longing is a note
of a symphony played out in a solitary forest, a pliant ocean holding aloft
the music falling in an incessant stream.
The rain has memories of ancient dreams...
The anguish in the sounds of the rain.

• In the dark of the forest
  Where the shadows move
  At the rhythm of the wind
  And the typing of the rain
  In the dark of the forest
  Where you do not see a hand in hand
  Slides a soul under the tree
  But he is not present
  In the dark of the forest
  He is sitting there with curved back
  Run through the rain
  There is no way back
  In the dark of the forest
  Is he mother soul alone?
  Just the shadow of the trees
  Watch around him
  In the dark of the forest
  Hit the path
  Waiting for the morning
  That wakes him out of his dream
  In the dark of the forest
  Where the night radiates her silence
  Sits a lonely man
  In the darkness lost
  That was the hunter
  A mouth like a gun
  With words like bullets
  22h

Antifascist rally at Buchenwald concentration camp, 1945.

 In British-occupied Hamburg, a joint KPD-SPD action committee convened in July 1945 with broad support from their respective memberships to declare:

The will to merge into a powerful political party lives in the hearts of the millions of supporters of the once warring German workers’ parties as the most meaningful outcome of their shared suffering. This desire is deeply etched into all of the surviving prisoners from the concentration camps, prisons, and Gestapo institutions.

A pause, an end, a beginning, fresh,
a beginning after a pause,
all these are given in time
to measure the steps and the directions we take.
Give yourself a time to pause.
The pause will show you where you are;
the pause will show you where
you were heading for.
A lot can happen in a pause.
Holding my breath, I enter the pause;
holding the edge of Time
I come out of the pause and flow
with the river of Time.
I have survived often,
the times of a pause;
I will survive
until the time comes when the pause will be a real pause, not a small interval in Time. 

There were times when I was set
face to face with the Light and the Rays.
I heard you call my name.
"Get up my dear, it's morning, rather too late," you said.
But face to face with the awesome light, I was terrified to seize the hand.
The colours of the primal state
overwhelmed me in their stark simplicity.
but you seemed equanimous.
You were always one step ahead of me,
in the balancing as well as in the follies.
When all were engaged in the desperate deed
of saving your body and your undying spirit,
you had gone past the meditative state of analysis.
You had reached past the ephemeral
to draw your own derivatives
on what was worth preserving and what wasn't.
The breach of understanding between what you wanted to convey,
and what I failed to catch, was expanding enormously.
You were speedily crossing the line, moving past touch, sound, taste, and sight.
You had gone into the second state of meditation, deep reflection on the Mind,
the supreme witness of sensations and thoughts.
Then all the torment ceased, and you were in bliss.
A beatitude began to shine on your brow.
Even the ecstasy ceased, and you were in complete concentration.
You were your own mentor now, the complete heretic, the fearless atheist
that you were in life, so were you in the concentration achieved in the moment of death.
Thereafter, I lost track of you.
But somehow, knowing you in life, I can see how you fared on the route ahead.
Compassion, not for your smaller self, but inclusive of all, which sometimes you glimpsed in life,
fondness, love and stern justice, which were the markers of your life here;
dawned again on you in their pure undefiled spirit.
Thus far and no further, we were companions of life here.
Did I play my role of goading you on in this life
like a nagging, stubborn wife?
Did I hold you to life, like the deity holding one with the chain?
Did I help you like the deity fighting the forces of death?
And if finally I came, like the deity holding the heavenly bell,
letting fall the rain, of nectar on your soul,
I can say that I fulfilled the mission of my life.

The fligh bird!

We are slowly getting used
to living in a world
where people live
occupied, colonized, or dispossessed;
where peace is a word that whispers "War" under its breath.
A spectacular deception is underway
taking away
beliefs and systems
that held sway
on minds for decades of futility.
Yet we survive, we eat, drink, go to sleep,
wake up in the morning to resume the day.
Once in a while, we complain,
only to be told politely,
"Power is everything and you have none"
We swallow the tutelage
because it is administered politely.

THE MYTH OF THE MAIDEN GODDESS

THE MYTH OF THE MAIDEN GODDESS


The bright red bird came flaming down
in love, in the wind
in the passion of the scarlet crown,
swooping down upon the maiden breast
to break open the vault that sealed
the secret seeds
to be sown in a virgin soil.
The wind stood still,
the forest, amazed
and the maiden numb
terrorized beyond a word.
The seed-word, the myth
of a new age, yet to be born,
pulsated in the heart of the terrorized girl
whose terror soon transformed
in the understanding
of a purpose.  

The reason of the knowledge of the deed
quietened the heart.
wounded, inert, she lay in peace.

This Little Thing Was Broken

This little thing was blown
against the wind,
its petals gone,
is now a stem of someone's thought.

This little book,
its pages fluttering,
stands in the rain.
It is now a spirit, recaptured in someone's mind.

This season of spring
stands bewildered in the moment of going.
It is a draft of wind,
breaking in sharp through the crack in the wall.

This spirit once lay scattered on the sea.
Someone came and gathered in his arms
the petals, the pages, the wind and the rain that tossed it so.
The spirit awakened, in God's embrace, saw the rationale.
The scattered spirit is whole again




























This little thing was blown
against the wind,
its petals gone,
is now a stem of someone's thought.

This little book,
its pages fluttering,
stands in the rain.
It is now a spirit, recaptured in someone's mind.

This season of spring
stands bewildered in the moment of going.
It is a draft of wind,
breaking in sharp through the crack in the wall.

This spirit once lay scattered on the sea.
Someone came and gathered in his arms
the petals, the pages, the wind and the rain that tossed it so.
The spirit awakened,
and in God's embrace, saw the rationale.
The scattered spirit is whole again

Fresh like the dew of the early sun,
floating on the wings of the cloud...
an elusive contact between heaven and earth...
In that moment you walked past Love
like the slow, rippling aura of a fragrant dawn.

Something held you back;
you swayed back and forth
And a  vagrant thing, drifting in the wind on the bank of the river,
saw your silhouette in the gray, unresponsive sky.
Your breath, heavy with the scent of the night rose,
lingered on the river and rippled past
 the weeds and the reeds of grass.

All the beautiful things of this life
touch briefly under this arch,
and we in our vagrancy,
catch the shadow and fix it on our walls.


Image received via Janos Szabo
originally shared by AI R

A Place To Dream

On a bright summer day
when the afternoon time hits you hard in the face
an arboreal dream swallows the day.
Amazing this earth and
amazing its multiple hands .
This ancient tree has thousands of aeons marked on its bark
and like pages of a carbon print
I wanted to feel it,
flick through its pages,
write my name with a knife
on one of the random finds.
But the greatest wonder came
when one day someone had overtaken me and already taken possession of the tree.
It seemed the tree and the man knew what it was to survive centuries
 aeons after aeons with a single thread of love

running between them and calling,

to keep their tryst with time.
The  man had lain his head
trustfully in the lap of the tree.
He was dreaming the life of tree.

 Image courtesy +Hector Merced

A place to dream

The Little Fish

The mighty waterfall
of  absurdity,
and I am invaded all around.
Besieged in the vortex,
in the abyss of the gorge,
I am struggling to catch in my swirling net
a little fish twinkling
like a silver coin.
As it slips from the net
I struggle to catch it in my palms,
hoping that one day this little one may grow big,
and keep on growing endlessly.
One day it might grow a horn
and break this expanding sphere of nothingness;
tear the veil and on its mighty wing
force the world which I cannot see;
force it into the open,
into the field of my eye;
this little fish,twinkling and winking in my hands.