Sometimes it is Birds

Anuradha Majumdar

What’s so funny?

To have and to hold the end of war in the well of angels,

It’s flight in fight, but still, we are the untitled.

Just for detail, can you stand on your head, fly your way home, always?

Are you akin to the river spirit when the moorings go adrift,

And to the naked eye, all optical strategies drop to glass pieces?

The end never comes fast enough. Well, almost.

What’s so funny?

They’re making drastic cuts for the outer eye strategies.

It’s a brand new game, in advance of arrival:

Of rough cuts and sudden shadows, as sweet dreams of falling angels

Transfigure the night in forgotten lands.

Yet, many steps ahead waits the immovable voyager:

Making maps, making maps. In the palaces of the wind.

What’s so funny?

In the back room, between four seasons, the eye of heaven opens with élan.

But fresh blood betrays the ardour amplifying the dawn.

Yet, even if we fall, O my mother, in the deep spiral of tears,

There will be a revelation. Like beauty that speeds, slow and dense

Unfolding through the feasts of god. Why then

Does earth remain so inhuman? Why so much night in our days…

Three birds call at the doorstep singing: ‘Bonjour, o mon amour!’

A sudden chirp of wings and it is a joyous apocalypse.

First passage! Bright moment! Here is the never ending dream.

Earth reboots our intransigence in her ever changing wind.

Reflect again: the silent waves, as state upon state is born.

The birds sit and repeat the bulging infinite.

Funny? May b.

Grace Notes #2 / extract

Anuradha Majumdar

The prayers will come, the water, the rain, in the ceremony of one who is alone, altered in the crevices of gold that stream like rivers out from a stone, made light by the light new born of the sun, as dawn creeps in through the crease of night, unbidden, unasked by the darkness, for a heart beseeched from deep inner seas, its flame throw of longing, gold and green, like a field of flowers, windswept by time into the wild carousel of day, into a street torn and blind, searching for a prayer mislaid, devoured by the hunger of time, gnawing away at its dream like a beast of prey, its teeth sinking through darkness, drowning in millenniums of pain, to find, at last, at its core, a quiet petal of rose, waiting alone and sovereign, in an unending well of prayer - never once dry - even though histories trampled by, burying it under the shrapnel of time, cold roasted in hate or burnt with betrayals: but this prayer waits as its fragrance swells, cell by cell, till it tempts from the sky a smile that has no ending…