TRANSFIGURATION

 

The woman singing with her desert-voice

transformed the sky and the sand,

the nomad sitting by the barren bush

into one seamless immensity. The mirage

changed into the spring-water, streaming

along the orange groves in the oasis,

between the palm and date trees

by the well yet the transient mirage

of her face, gazing through the round

wheel-window, could not be effaced.

Her mirage-face still trembles

in my imagination while the sun blazes

on the scintillating sand-dunes

and the desert’s redeemed bushes.

 

 

 

A WOMAN BY A WELL

​

My water-image whispers back to me:

my curiosity is a well-spring dug

deep by my scanning senses like broad'ning

buckets scooping my tranquil core, my live-

stock's pulse in the desert drought, my pastor's

freedom from death in his nomad-journey.

Suddenly, my wind-torn image trembles

like mercury-tears, pulsing like the stars.

My image-strings are now sheared, now revealed.

Free, guilt-free, on the trespassed gate, I feel

the fathom-free air in me. I stand straight

at the threshold of endless gates. My ink

waves carve a laurel crown: my mind-swollen

void curved with inner breezes, swinging.

 

 

 

 

DOLPHINS

​

​

Like a silver bond of words adjusting

to their meanings, I surf on the crest

of the blood-wave above a bass-shoal

near the sea-skin, brine blinding

my eyes. Clinging to the keel with vigilant

sinews, I spruce it up to challenge

the wind's weight. Suddenly, a school

of dolphins, pass me by, playing at pirouettes,

smiling, whispering like transmigrating

spirits, perhaps, escaping the slaughter

of feud-driven men. WIth their calves, they will

one day, reclaim their maimed bodies

from our bleeding beaches or become

our conditional foes, our drugged apes.

 

 

HAÏKUS

 

Pyres and pyres

sheep carcasses on fire

a purified farmer

 

Opalescent waves

brine, pine, algae scents

my husband's silent seas

 

The moon rises above

the sea like the sun-lit rind

of a blood orange

 

​

BLOOD

​

In her crimson congruence,

my blood flows, streams, gushes

from the scarlet carnation's corrugated,

grain-torn heart, reaching

the stigma's symmetry, rich

with wind-scattered pollen,

seeping into the flower's style.

Syncopated. Dappled is my blood,

variegated with the carnation's redness

against her petals' dark contours,

streaked with white, black, purple,

intuiting the sweet kiss, long

hidden in your carnation's 

melancholic heart.

 

 

 

THE GINGKO

​

A temple of inner truce, the gingko

recreates my passing time. Like the first

fern forests, the gingko rejuvenates

my running, rowing rhythms, 

my body-building rhymes. I daydream

of the gingko's time-seams,

the sylvan rings creating a time leap,

and imagine the male gingko seeds

 

fitting their female knobs in the rain.

The fern-knowledge of the seeds enters

my poem's virgin-bark, each

re-appraised stem-page,

tensing my lines with the time-free

strains of the present.

 

​

A HAÏKU

​

A fiery egg-yolk,

The sun sets on the flood of

Crimson summer clouds

 

 

THE WHITE OWL

 

Clearing from the nocturnal fields

like the white owl, memory seized

us after we sang exile's bitter

herbs and drank the turbulent wine 

that hurt us as your son, mourning

his mother's sudden death, rejected you,

tearing up the cheque you gave him.

You left. Like the impeccable

snow reflecting our inner peace, all

too suddenly, his striated eyes turned

inwards, a soaring whiteness,

barely spot-streaked, night-gliding,

 

with wind-harnessed wings, crossed

our road, shearing our darkness.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The White Owl" was a commended sonnet at the Stanza Competition and read out at the Southbank Centre on National Poetry Day in London in October 2014.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

​

 

THE BIRTH OF IMAGES

 

Hypnotised bees buzz before

their nectar-ramble, their thousand

wheezes trill the air, tense my ears:

the air bloats with remote silhouettes

like the plot of a mystery. The bees dance

in angular trends, rocking the hive’s path

to the compass-sun’s silo, reaching

with the hive's hymn towards the sun's ionic halo.

The sky stretches in chiaroscuro slices

inside the bees' myriad eyes. The sun's wreath

ties in, also through my eyes, the polaroid

quilt-vault to the bee’s orb-eyes, the flower’s

gut to the bee's honey-gullet, the shack’s

squalor, the quilter's toil to the stars.

​

 

THE ESTUARY (published in The London Magazine)

 

A water where

the ebb-wave, flood-born

is flood-broken yet

the wave wavers and transports

me through the river's mouth

 

into the sea. A flood-broken

ebb-wave where the slime sucked

below the swell, oozes

the surface light through

its dun density,

an ochre silt mass lulled by

the wave's gliding gait.

 

A water whose slime

slides under the wave’s swelling skin

whose slime settles through the light's

silence winnowing through a prism

 

and between the ebb and the flux

billow-buoyed mud

suffuses

my mood with

the fluid mnemonic snapshot

of the estuary

 

where the mud flood faints

waywardly weaning

new fluent transfers

in sleek serpentine streaks

of oceanic blue.

 

 

DOLPHINS

 

Like a silver bond of words adjusting

to their meanings, I surf on the crest

of the blood-wave above a bass-shoal

near the sea-skin, brine blinding

my eyes. Clinging to the keel with vigilant

sinews, I spruce it up to challenge

the wind’s weight. Suddenly, a school

of dolphins, pass me by, playing at pirouettes,

smiling, whispering like transmigrating

spirits, perhaps, escaping the slaughter

of feud-driven men. With their calves, they will

one day, reclaim their maimed bodies

from our bleeding beaches or become

our conditional foes like our drugged apes.

​

​

THE ROSE

​

My rose breathes the warm

summer morning on this bright

halcyon day

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​