1
On the road from Gundalpet to Bandipur,
Time is a confused choice between heights.
Like an old village way,
everyone has a friend to wish,
the name of a relative to remember,
the warm smile of a lover to feel:
everyone imagines, a peak of memory.
There happens to be a question above all questions,
A silence thicker than all strangeness,
a moment longer than all eternity.
On the road from Gundalpet to Bandipur,
Our car imagines itself to be a wild, migrating bird
that returns to its nest only once a year.
2
While traveling alone,
Sunset is an empty gallery.
Standing on the deck
of a four-storied ship,
deeper than your expectation or mine is
the terror inflicted by the sea's blue,
powerless its attempts to console the loner with vastness,
invalid its artistry in clouds to remind children.
Toiled with distance and separation,
each clich餠visual is a painful glass box:
Their well arranged, repetitive appearance,
As insensitive as the functional scientific name of
A variety of sea fish.
3
While seeing the giant system of lamps and lenses
Atop the light house at Kavaratti with coast guard Anand,
Memory passed like a fading signal from the distance.
About father and grandfather,
About old Kollam and its haunted beaches,
The older light house at Thankassery
where silence hides a sting with vengeance in its secret hives,
About the oldest of the oldest lighthouses
that set fire in its own head like mothers
to reach distant vision of its lost sons.
Never
I will never use the word revolution again;
In rooms stinking liquor and cigarette,
I have seen great ideas
go up like smoke;
sacrificed as secrets to
the silence of the Satan's.
Never again would
ideology become my framework;
I have seen children of great thinkers,
deprived of food and words,
roaming naked through the streets.
Politics is no more my priority;
In the house of workers,
smelling bricks, metal and resistance,
I have seen chimneys
turn into black clouds of sadness.
I will never use the word hope again;
I have seen the prodigy who came
blessed by the gods of imagination
return a total wreck in a battle with raw reality.
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