THIS IS THE NIGHT

 This is the night

when the stars follow a lonely moon

and fairies jump into a boat

to catch the last ferry to return to home in the sky.

I am breathless

following the wind.

Slow down;

let me catch up.

Walk, do not run.

The rain is beating upon my back;

I am soaked, shivering to the bones.

Indiscreet, the touch of rain,

like a charade acted out,

asking me to guess your word

leaving just a touch for a clue.

When the sunlight pours...

 When the sunlight pours

it pours like rain.

Like an abstruse flow of water

it takes the shape of the things it touches;

every form becomes a shape,

a circle, a triangle, squares and all.

Every possible contour of geometry

gets defined and falls in place.

On one such morning of the precision of the sun

I saw her standing in the beam of light,

mesmerized, and mesmerizing!

She was standing quiet, peaceful,

her features drawn in light and dark,

brooding, secretive, lost in the light

and discovered in the shadow

in the emerging day.

Sushama Karnik.

WINDOW

 WINDOW

A window in solitude

the sun sloping down on the hills, trees reclining,

a quiet descending, a coffee mug,

the smoke of dried up twigs

rising beyond,

spreading a screen of something I cannot name,

hope, despair, sleep...

I need a book to browse the pages of a life,

which I started reading in my youth,

and then gave up for something else,

and then began an endless trail

of stories given up half read,

bookmarked for reading at a later day, a better time,

a time marked but never recounted, for the time of counting was long gone.

This window's not bad, after all.

The coffee has tasted never so warm, never so good.

A trifle lot of odd things, collected and thrown away.

A solitary window, a coffee mug,

a landscape with a few brushstrokes, simple, uncluttered,clean.

Just have to mind that marine blue,

which I always tended to overuse

and plunge the perfected piece with just that addition of marine blue

into a dark tide of despairing gloom

which no amount of cleaning and rubbing salt over

could rectify and restore to the serene blue of the sky.

Picture: Event South Seattle Emerald Woman sitting with a coffee mug

 Sea gulls crossing the sea,

a time when the universe

comes to life and speaks.

A time of longing,

for something in the sea,

the waves and the rocks;

when something vast,

takes on a form

of something I know and see.

A cosmic tide of a feeling moves

and touches the sky,

and the clouds portray

a magnanimous love

happening across the sky.

Sushama Karnik

WHEN yOU aRE qUIET...

 When You Are Quiet

When you are quiet and serene,

the cold winter fireside glows;

your face hides in the shadows;

a grey mist hides the silver screen.

A silence presides over your being,

and in the dark interior of your mind

I see nothing else except your lips.

Sushama Karnik

 Sea gulls crossing the sea,

a time when the universe

comes to life and speaks.

A time of longing,

for something in the sea,

the waves and the rocks;

when something vast,

takes on a form

of something I know and see.

A cosmic tide of a feeling moves

and touches the sky,

and the clouds portray

a magnanimous love

happening across the sky.

Sushama Karnik