Six A.M. the bulbul arrived
Our backyard worms forgot
It was his breakfast time.
Beauty had cried in torrents
Of words bereft of thought
Till the blazing March sun
Beat history's scraggly stones
A midsummer celebration
Ensued with images galore
Beauty returned from the hills.
In my nights of waiting
For sunrise and flowers
I look pain in the face.
I wake up bleary-eyed
Trying to catch beach suns
Before they turn white.
It is this luminosity, my dear,
Of the gilded leaves in the sun
The magic eye promptly catches
A silver flicker, a yellow transience.
A palliative to the chemical pain
In variously knotted entrails and
The reddish tinge in eye-whites.
A lone flamingo shrieks in its sleep
Causing ripples in the night's stillness .
Clusters of acacias that had grown
Waterless under the skin of the earth
Spread their ghostly hair evenly
In the rainless , blazing August sky.
The temple bell rang and rang
With its thick tongue in fever.
The tree waited in the dark
Studded with white pearls
Of sleeping flamingos.
Dark liquid clouds
Coagulated around the moon
Drawing a nebulous circle
Presaging silver rain .
