The Breeze

The ocean around that island

where she lived seldom calmed down.

The island itself was almost never visible

to any living eye, except perhaps

to those November birds on their way to winters.

It was always misted over with fine salt spray.

It was a tiny island of sand,

a little patch of grassy earth and

that old, twisted and gnarled oak,

Which had no reason to be there, but still was!

She was thankful for it though,

for its branches were her home.

Every morning she would leave just at dawn

to visit the little kids on an island a few hours away.

Just for a few minutes she remained there

basking and warming in the midday sun,

before she turned and returned

back to her own oak and her own island.

It seldom rained where the kids lived,

but every day they smelt its hope in those minutes.

For every day, the breeze would collect

the heady petrichor off her salt dampened

patch of oaken grassy earth, and fly it across
those ocean hours, a beacon of a promise to be kept.

The Answer Question

The body lies trapped in the soul’s snare;
choking it inch by slow inch that merciless sprite
neither lets it die nor does it kill.
Wonder which grudge is it holding upon.
Such a sudden, vicious clutch at the throat
that the body thrashes desperate
praying for the breaths to cease.
The wily soul however, keeps it lassoed
with that final breath.

Eyes forget to blink, staring in terror as
the soul sharpens its claws, deliberate
and malicious on the millstone of time.
It’ll be one of those days again, when
every layer of thought will be scraped raw
plucking and snipping the seams of memories.
May it just rip out and uproot all feeling,
cast them into that smoldering inferno,
forever turned into black ash, never again
ever to be sensed by the body.

Smiling with diabolical coldness instead, the soul
one after the other, meticulously lines up
a glaringly exposed, stark naked parade of
every plucked feeling, every incised memory,
in the sadist flickering of that infernal light.
There’s no respite behind eyelids shut tight
for this graphic tirade brands itself
as a sizzling retinal scar, marked forever
if ever at all it heals, though with every intent
to eternally fester, an oozing wound.

Amidst every grip of its talons, every choke,
every rip of its claws, every frigid smile of its
devilish lips, amidst every thrash,
every scream of the tortured body, the soul
had not uttered a single word
nor made the faintest noise. Nothing
but a cold unwavering maniacal stare at
the Body, slipknotted with that final breath.
At length, in reply to its every question
the Soul simply whispered its own-

          “Now, why should this mirror terrify you so?”

Nebula

Remnants of ancient red giants,
Sparks from young supernovas,
Wakes of celestial voyagers-
Stardust, long adrift in nothingness
Desperately seeking community
Warp across space by unseen forces
Restlessly gathering at a galactic horizon.

A playground for gravity-
Irresistible attractions,
Collisions upon collisions,
Innumerable nucleic explosions,
Countless unseen implosions,
A raging cauldron of entropy
Threatening to rip itself apart.

And yet it is an aspiring whole,
An undiscovered singularity.
Soon there will be a stable warmth,
There will be a unique radiance,
A peerless stellar energy.
Soon,
There will be Light!