Is it dusk already? The doves
on the electric pole must have gone home.
In here, your heart is bleeding away
into the pool of your unbearable solitude.
When did the eggs crack open?
When did their wings become dry?
The sun had laughed at you from behind his screen
of clouds. You had turned to face the wind
once, twice, thrice.
But the answers were always the same.
And now, it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing
takes away the sharpness
of knives whittling down bones.
Soon, they will be gone. You will not
know the hour of departure when it comes,
even after the door has closed behind them.

Wake up

To the grass bending to receive
its daily pint of dew. To the road lying quiet
beneath the stampede of day. To last
night’s embers that still harbour
a spark or the hope of a spark. It’s time
to go back to that last full moon, when
you had an urge to pluck the orb
fresh off the sky and place it on
your warm sticky tongue. White
as the flavour of spearmint gum,
and as cold as a slice of arctic ice,
melting slowly, radiating

                                         its aura around you.

This is the taste of solitude.
Its sweetness is divine. Its touch thinner
than a dove’s eggshell. Its scent
more delicate than a damselfly’s wing. And,
its harmony is one that can never be known
in the company of constant love. 

Something disturbs.   
There is a movement
in the rushes and waterweeds. And you
see them rise
as one. They dive
upwards
into paling air. Black
flap of wings dropping dew-like
globules
returning water to the marsh beneath
them. They dive upwards.
Their necks snaking
towards sky. Smoke
from scud scatters at a touch
of their webbed feet. Light swims
from wing
tip to wing tip.     
Into the waiting blue
they go. Become dots like pock
marks on sky-skin. And then,
downward bound again
they swoop
to where the minnows
beckon, and frogs play
dead among the unhurried pace
of water snails.  Intense-eyed they seek
only that
which their bodies can keep.
Unlike man.  Unlike
man’s ceaseless greed.

A few days before she leaves, she teaches me
a new word. Petrichor. And when I forget
its shape and sound, remembering only
the taste, touch and smell of it, she points
to the moist evening outside, inhaling from
the soaked earth, asphalt, flower pots, car tops,
anything that rain cared to visit. Petrichor,
she repeats. I murmur after her. A chant
that I will wear like a talisman in the barren
months ahead. Dread spread by newspapers.
Fear from TV channels. More than what
I had ever dreamed of. At her age I had been
almost foolhardy… But now my heart is wet.
Horses thunder past my bed
when I lie down at night. Their clean animal scents
linger on. I can see the meandering pathway
from her school stables. I see her going
to the most solitary place on earth. Grass pitch
they call it. Her mates and her. Serene. Empty
of everything but the gentlest of beings. Where grass
meets bog meets clear water meets sky meets
slender steep eucalyptus trunks. She comes here
I know. And not always on horseback. She comes here
alone to gather silence. I do not fear this place.
The ones I do, are closer home. I am so
powerless. I cannot compress the world
she inhabits now. I cannot return her
to my womb where petrichor is eternal.