Aijaz wani |
Of childhood dreams
Childhood, as I view it nowFrom the vantage of adult age,
Appears to me but a haunt of dreams
Of natures purely unnatural.
There are some that chimera seem
Like childhood activity of catching a beam
Of the morning sun that peeped
Through the crevice of the window pane.
Some dreams behoved fictional domains
Wherein fancifully I perceived myself
A Quixote at some windmill
Turning the wheel of imagination.
A dream, too, to churn the world
To some utopia brimmed my heart,
A utopia where ills were alien
And pain and worries worried none.
A dream is there the childhood mania
To flee from the realms of childhood itself,
The biggest paradox of one's entire life,
And assume a role of the adult age.
Yes, there should be a candid confession
About dreams that I cherished
Which, if realized, would put to shame
Even the most shameless of men.
The Vernal Era
In the vernal era every yearWhen my land,
Like a stunningly fair maiden
Whom every discerning bachelor
Does dream to be his bride
Both in reverie and slumber,
Wears novel connotations
And meanings deep,
Luring every common eye
To roll in a fine frenzy
And rhapsodise uncommon numbers;
When the variegated flowers
Exude beauty and fragrance
In such vague portions
That each entity does vie
For victory and yet assume the stance
Of an anxious scholar;
When the running rivulets
Murmur lullabies to their frequenters
And ferry them to fairylands
Our bards, ancient and modern,have,
By the magic quaint, built
In the cozy fanciful imaginations;
When the carpety greens
Of the mountain meadows
Harbouring a million suns
Appeal alike
To the lover and the lamb
And cause them to go
For bounds,gleeful and sweet,
Unwitnessed hitherto
And unforeseeable thitherto;
Then, with secret diffidence I yearn
To have the knack of halting the wheel
Of that inveterate courser
And make Beauty pause awhile
So that I could paint her
On the canvas of my memory
And treasure her there for eternity
For myself and my ilk.
The Whiff of Insanity
Since the first day of my lifeI have been a devil's advocate,
Thinking the sheer unthinkable
And looking at things a squint like,
Feeling bitterness in the dessert
And savouring atremesia as honey,
Loving what could be coined pain
And being pained by glee.
Since the first day of my life
I have been following the dreams
That blunder against those of others,
And my dreams themselves sustain
Smashes and crushes, and squeezes too
And break into a million parts,
Each part then laughes scoffingly
At the ordeal of the reharmony.
Since the first day of my life
My boat strives against the wind
And the course of the river of life;
I sink and surface, and get battered.
Yet, like a masochist quaint
Gulp down the berries of the pang
With a tasteful crush beneath the tongue.
Since the first day of my life
I have been wandering in my wilderness
Like that cursed stag
Transmogrified from a menacing man
After having pruriently played a voyeur
On some secret shore of the Atlantic
Where Diana bathed her milken breast.
Since the first day of my life
I have been nurturing a bastard sprout
Of the reason's apple tree,
Otherwise in her mellowing year;
Yet, far away do I dwell
From the salubrious shade of ripeness
Where the whiff of my insanity
Should drop onto my being
Like an apple from some bough.
The Miracles
The world is rife with miraclesAnd the womb of every moment
A miracle surely does body forth;
A dark night melts into the dazzling light,
And from the Winter's barren womb
The blossomy Spring does bloom;
Yet again it is a miracle
The way tender Spring does trudge
Through the Summer's vulgar youth
To the maturity of the mellowing Autumn.
A mother's care for her babes
Until they walk on twos or fours,
Nay, until they become dads and moms
Does in the fold of miracle come
For the progeny does see flourishes so
And the creatures to higher rungs go.
The course of Water, too, to me does seem
Treading on the mills of a miracle,
From the sleety flakes to the running brooks
And to the vapoury ideas befitting books
It voyages so vociferously
That the noise miraculously unnoticed goes.
Should you delve deep and ponder
You'd against some miracle blunder,
Yet it is the miracle of the miracles
That the miracles mundane matters seem.
Prayers for my Daughter
(Written about the time when I was away from home)Under the star studded sky
And the milk moistened moon,
A ramble I have, after a cloying dinner,
Past red mellow apples
Hung upon supple boughs
That kneel under the load of mellowness
Akin to a devout Muslim in 'rakoo'
The full moon and her shimmering sheen
And the sky studded with stars serene
Piggyback me to those moments of being
When my beloved daughter
Would talk to me on the phone
Nocturnally and inveterately,
While I lay far away from home
Among people that spoke Greek to me.
She would invoke all her childish innocence
And alibies springing out of filial love,
And stretch chats by padding them
With allusions to affairs homely and naive.
Once she rang me up while I rambled,
After a cloying dinner, under the full moon
And the star studded sky;
She innocently insisted that I should
Rest my eyes upon the moon
And try to fancy her there,
And she would requit the same
And locate me upon the moon.
This would, she quipped childishly,
Enable us to establish double communion
By melting the distance that wedged
Between a father and his darling daughter.
I had but to pass on a nod
That I saw her upon the moon,
Musing she must have found me
By some miracle upon the moon.
This evening, before setting out for a walk,
I found her fast asleep, perhaps dreaming
Her future life through thick and thin,
While the moonbeams glimmered
In a thousand ways on her angelic face
And the stars ,too, studded her grace.
A horde of fears strike hard the father's bosom,
Fears that concern her walk into the intriguing world
For naivety here is taken to task for nought.
My heart reaches upto the mouth and mutters
And believingly utters the prayers so heartfelt.
Let the full moon of hope shine on her
In the nights of gloom and sadness,
And hollow hours groping for peace;
Let her native goodness firmly linger
And embroider the hem of her innocence;
Let the mellowness sink into her being
And strike there such humility of the boughs
That each word she utters may be
A red mellow apple ready to be plucked.
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