Three Poems by Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Sandeep Kumar Mishra

Sandeep Kumar Mishra

A Rainbow Memory

When my hollow present blows
The dying embers in the heart grate
A fond childish Cinders glows up;
The frozen black memory melts past colours,
A sparkle of rainbow recollections,
As I walk upon our trodden pavement
I saw a splash of sea between houses;
Thy red dress like a bright red boat
Sink in golden sand, blue fishing nets
Brown fort walls, green lichen beach;
My soul speaks, my lips move
A frequency of meetings, a wave of hugs;
As I net to catch these moments
Like A street urchin’s yellow fists
Holding the rainbow in his tiny grasp

Pebbles

Time smoothes rainbow hardness
Of tree basalt, vermillion jasper,
Silvery granite and pale feldspar
With the help of humdrum
But patient jeweler of tides;
Volcano-born, earthquake-quarried,
Heat-cracked, wind-carved,
Death shapes compact among the rocks;
It drifts light as a fractured bone
When the tide uncovers,
It blinks among the smashed shells,
Upset by gulls, bleached by salt and sun
The broken crockery of living things;
An eagle surveys from the upland,
Unsympathetic to the burdens
I have carried here;
The sea would not hug me, so I sit,
Hollow as driftwood, jumbled as pebbles

Singularity of the Plurality

As the eyes blink to face the sun
Life trembles with the lack of air,
The birth never meets the death
As soul wants to escape the body;
One force guides the other
As the soul is muscle-bound,
Two forces work together
Sometimes indifferently
But they needn’t exist at a place;
The monism nullify our lives
As nothing that we do, ultimately survives,
No progress or flaws, nothing begins or ends,
The world is not like that, the world is full of blind fjord,
Never finished, never the same twice
Lost as we hold, always to be regained,
Perfection is a fallen fruit
Between that meaning and the matter;
Our desire to get that supreme state
Plasters each aperture by numb ideal of white
Universal, refusing to allow Division or dispersal;
If man is an image of God, the god disintegrates
Man is man because once he was a beast,
The man is crazy with resentment, he is dashed
By good hopes or bad dreams against the world,
But conscious of the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of time.

Setu Anniversary, June 2017