In the Long Reaches of the Sky


Kyewee...its nasal call sets the crown chakra in motion. Curtains flutter. Breath focuses on itself. But, the feet, overcome by impatience,  scuttle down the stony path...Eyes search the firmament.

Wings spread, there it goes, a Brahminy kite, skimming across the faint sliver of the crescent moon. A momentary splintering of the gossamer vision, and lo, a scatter of silver, and the air is astir with glinting flecks of light. Just a bit more than a dot really,  it calls again, cruising majestically. My own auditory capabilities surprise me. "How can I hear something so far away, when often enough I am ridiculed for not being able to hear what those in close proximity are saying", I wonder.

The chestnut colored legendary raptor circles the heights, dispersing the blue across the deepening layers of the celestial vault. Kyewee...another call sails in from the east. A new entrant flying at a lower altitude, makes itself palpable against the splash of cerulean in my irises. Its wings seem to touch the tips of my outstretched hands. For a moment there, I am one with infinity, and with the unknownness of this mystical journey. 


the unmistakable call
shuffling of wings
cracks in the wall
a shadow swings,
'cross the paling moon
echoes rebound
in a silver cocoon
of enclosing sound.
eager feet run out
eyes scan the blues
there, without a doubt
setting itself loose
is 'myself' beyond me
embracing the sky
outstretched and free
shimmering i fly...



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

C'est La Vie...Really?

Seven peacocks sit on the parapet of our terrace fronting the bay. A murder of crows spearing into the morning silence flies past chasing a hungry Brahminy kite who desires absolutely nothing but a clutch of eggs for breakfast.  The jails in the country are packed with sloganeering opposition leaders, journalists, activists, and to use everyone's favorite term, 'pseudo-intellectuals'. As elections draw near, the dire need to quash all competition has arisen  within the alpha party.  More than six months on, the war wages on in  the Holy Land. Yet, the country responsible for it, stands fifth on the World happiness index! According to the United Nations, more than a million people are likely to suffer from starvation in the war-torn region since aid is not being able  to reach the affected populace because of innumerable road blocks.  It rained last night. An out of season shower, which brought the peacocks out of the coconut grove. The cashew tree now laden with fruits, spa
Read more

Beyond dreams and awakenings

How to sift reality from non-reality? Pry dreams from fiction?  Our daily constitutional. In an inadvertent raising of the eyes, rust orange of a crow-pheasant in flight caught and released by the irises...scales of a snake dangling from its beak wring the air silver, merciless.   Further up, on a path crisscrossed by the trembling shadows of coconut trees, an explosion. Anvil hammers away on frail eardrums. Something bounces off the ground, grazes past the right foot: a humongous coconut. Mumsy is unperturbed. "They never fall on people," she reassures me, adding sweetly, "for they have eyes". She points them out to me. I pick up the deadly fruit and shake it: the sound of ambrosial water splashes therein. There is a triumphant smile on mumsy's face, "It is a good one," she exclaims. I am still fazed by this close encounter.  "How many people die from coconut falling on their head" I google. According to a British Travel Insurance Company, c
Read more

Summer Blues

Image
the cashew carrier It is difficult to respond to a long spell of tropical summer with anticipation or with memorable fondness. Clammy, humid, clinging and breathlessly hot, it ushers in an oppressive lusciousness and fructification. Neem, mango, cashew, rose apple, kumquat, all flowering and fruiting trees conspire to blossom, bear, and mature at once. A life of ontogeny and everything it encompasses such as fruit-flies, caterpillars, termite over-rush, and scorpion ants is not something we romanticize; we deal with it. As we do with the incessant two-note song of the koïl, sweet yet monotonous in its execution. Through the endless summers  dappled with our prayers for rains, for respite from heat and dust, peacocks strut down the winding path trumpeting, sounding and beckoning the clouds...I sense their yearnings.  Every few hours I haul myself to the yard to pick up the fallen cashew fruits, soft and swollen with juice. Sometimes only a spatter of overripe fleshiness is found, its fi
Read more