Periodic Thirst

When a forest sheds its leaves,

It’s a seasonal thing,

A periodic dropping of clothes;

An act of self-defence

Against the blow

Of pure, white snow

Dirtied as soon as it touches the brown soil:

It becomes soiled.

The muddy river doesn’t wash itself

It flows forward

Across the plains, across the hills

Across the cities,

Till dirtied to the core,

It finally loses itself

Into the arms of the waiting ocean stream

One of these days,

A dried up river will be bemoaned,

And a dry forest will be mourned;

Incessant snow freezes over soggy branches

Cold to the touch

Melting as it touches the ground:

A brown floor greedily gulps each melted drop of cold.

December 17, 2013

© Geetakshi Arora

A Knot

Threads of small, sand-covered dreams

Knitted into softest wool

Lie shaking under the cold, thundering sky:

An inky blue night

Unrelenting, harsh and dry;

Two knitting needles sunder and meet,

Clinking like glasses in joy

As unlined, tired hands

Ignore the pain and continue

Line by each patterned line:

Under and over;

Over and under

And on and on...

Here and there lie scattered

Pink dreams wrapped in gold,

A few simple loops of old-fashioned dawns,

And 

A reversal,

A patterned difficulty:

A guilty dream, painful and ignored;

A process complicated by sighs

From nearby trees: soft, deceitful

They ebb and flow,

Over and under;

Under and over

Sympathetic leaves fall to the ground

Like a red carpet uselessly laid out for the triumphant dead

And on and on

The yarn goes,

Over and under:

A long painful stretch

Of weak dream-carded wool

©Geetakshi Arora

December 11, 2013

Liquefied Frost

In those misty mornings

Flavoured with bleakness

Embalmed in disappointed feelings,

When coldness thaws in the middle of the night

For only a brief moment, tautly stretched:

I’ll meet you in that moment before sleep

I'll meet you where

Home is a place of absences

And numbness:

Let us find cancerous cures

In an anonymous, anesthetic love 

©Geetakshi Arora

November 29, 2013

Washed Away

Soft hands embed names

on pliant golden sand

Making nonsense patterns 

Too precious to be named;

Transient, to be washed away 

with the next weak wave

that leaves in its wake

a silent rush of deep brown mud:

Tear-stained and cracked. 

Repititive patterns

similarly mould 

a willing force,

defensive against itself;

Too selfish to be safe;

A quiet echo of painless surrender

Destroys all castles built out of purple reflections 

on the surface of some

silent, glassy lake

©Geetakshi Arora

November 9, 2013

Sediments

Those unmixed colours try to mingle

in the wavy sea of salty tears:

A deep, deep blue;

Like the silences you occupy

That mix with unspoken words,

Unspoken, not unheard.

The dark intent in your eyes

Resounds like a ripple

Somewhere in that forgotten within;

A pink-purple twilight laughingly

Strikes the orange canvas of the weak, winter sunlight;

There it is- that blank, silent night.

A thick grey haze erases,

rewrites a story,

replacing this lie with another

etched with glistening drops of red pain:

Everything is fine.

©Geetakshi Arora

November 8, 2013