Smuggled Buddha
By a white statue of the little Buddha,
I folded my legs to strike a lotus pose,
And faced another humongous red Buddha
In the glass-caged temple in front of me.
That was just to click myself in a picture
and to incarnate on the click-farms of Metaverse.
The marble inscription of the temple said:
This statue was stolen from China
And then smuggled to New York
Then bought by Louisiana
And installed on Avery Island.
Now I wonder:
In this transoceanic theft of Buddha,
What portion of Four Noble Truths,
What amount of compassion and self-knowledge
Did they smuggle in here?
If they had managed any,
Did they trap them in the same glass cage?
Mar. 1, 2024
Dream Bubble
At the sprightly site of these soap bubbles, my heart took off to the distant land and even more distant past. Here I was strolling at the Girard Park next to my university. There, I avoided the eyes of my parents and sometimes of my two elder sisters, to sneak out of my home onto the street. The street was unpaved and sparsely fenced with the sajiwans. With Spring, the sajiwans had new foliage of tempting leaves of a palm size with a slender finger-length of its petiole. I selected a promising leaf and plucked it from the base of its petiole with an extra caution not to break it otherwise. Then I snapped the petiole near the base of the blade making sure not to break the lower portion of its skin. Thus, I formed a tiny triangle which was filled instantly by a fragile film of transparent sap. Before it formed a droplet, I circled my lips into an O and gently blew right onto the sap triangle—a marble size bubble popped out of the triangle. Aha! My mission accomplished! The dreamy, transparent, and glistening bubble drifted a while in the air. I started chasing after it and touched it out of its existence. As it disappeared, a tiny droplet landed on my white Amul t-shirt and made an indelible dream-mark. I outgrew that t-shirt, but not the memory of the bubble mark.
Oct. 14, 2022
A Lafayette Evening
Dear Lafayette,
I gazed on your western horizon,
when the painter of the evening
kept mixing its colors on the ethereal
canvas turning it gold, orange, and darker orange.
Upon the base of ever-darkening
silhouette of trees and houses,
Countless twinkle of earthly stars came to life.
Griffin Hall on my right and a rooftop lamp-post
on my left framed my field of vision
on the canvas of now invisible painter.
From the upper left, a lone star stared down at me
And the Lunar crescent of the day two graced the center
as the painter headed to Eastern hemisphere.
My mother would soak barley and corn
and wish for a clear sky as she would wait
for a glimpse of the same lunar crescent to dig the holy soil
and make a tiny seedbed for the jamara.
I feel the soft golden shoots of barley and corn,
On the blurry border of the blue and orange.
Oct. 7, 2021
Beads
Johnston Street is different tonight
Regular wheels are not flashing
It teems with whole bunch of people
Didn’t know this place sheltered so many souls
White, blue, purple, gold, green, red, and what not
Were those beads
The crew of carnival flung them in both directions,
I caught some of them in the mid air
Romped with joy
Thought I got something substantial
Put them on my neck
One, two, three, … nineteen…twenty…
I stopped counting
Each catch adding up to my ecstasy
Piling up around my neck
The cool, smooth roundness of the beads
Caressed my open nape
And rolled over my breast
With each step, and jump I made
The beads would jostle as if to tear
the fabric of my shirt and be one with me
I couldn’t catch all of them,
I pine for the beads I tried to catch
But someone else grabbed before me
Or I misjudged the distance and they hit the ground
I was too proud to pick them up
If only I could reverse the time
And secure those missed moments
Which keep on pinching my heart with remorse
Now the parade is over
A kid jumps over the barricade
Picks up the beads scattered on the street
Handful, he runs to his parents to show the treasure
But what should I do with this neck-full of beads?
Carried them back to my abode
Put them on the table
Made a heart of a pink one
And sent it to my little girl
And got one in return
The string feels long enough
To keep the distant beads in touch!
March 26, 2021
Haiku-3
A twilight sets on
Bearded tress and lapping waves
When framed through a lens
Apr. 22, 2022
Haiku-1
Devkota once said
Man is great by heart not caste
Do you feel that way?
Nov. 5, 2021
Haiku-0
Sleet crystals settle
On a pebble bed and ask
For a snow blanket
Feb. 15, 2021
Arrival
When the tune of Sarswati’s bina
Mingled with the music of nine muses
When Kalidasha’s cloud messenger
Crossed the oceans to trigger the west wind of Shelley
When the oriental mystical universal self
Permeated Plotinus’s One and
Transcended Emerson’s Over soul
To condense into a drop on Whitman’s blade of grass,
I find myself morphed into a purple petal of Jacaranda
That maneuvered not to join the piling blanket on the turf,
Instead took flight on the wings of Oryx and
Joined the tap of acorn at this southern yard of Uncle Sam.
Nov. 28, 2019