Open bill stork

Open bill is the commonest stork found in India. Highly gregarious they are seen in noisy colonies adjacent to water bodies, an able flier they soar to great heights. The distinct feature of this stork is open gap in the middle part of the bill, earlier erroneously believed due to wear and tear but now we know it is an adaptation to grasp large fresh water snails on which it feeds.

Anna Akhmatova: a tormented mouth through which hundred million people scream…

Anna Akhmatova (1899-1966) is someone I have read before and it actually surprises me that I haven’t written about her in this blog much earlier. Born in Ukraine she took the pen name of her great grand mother “Akhmatova” as her father refused her to lend his name. She became a cult figure in Russia with her first collections of poem itself. She experienced repressive regime of Stalin but refused to immigrate and suffered much.

These lines from part of much popular “Requiem” on horror of Stalin’s massacres, it was banned and could be published only in 1987.

The hour has come to remember the dead.
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one who resisted the long drag to the open window;
The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar
soil beneath her feet;
The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,

'I arrive here as if I've come home!'
I'd like to name you all by name, but the list
Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
So,
I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble
words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new
grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition - do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Howled like a wounded beast.
Let the thawing ice flow like tears
From my immovable bronze eyelids
And let the prison dove coo in the distance
While ships sail quietly along the river.

Another stanza…

The word landed with a stony thud
Onto my still-beating breast.
Nevermind, I was prepared,
I will manage with the rest.

I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again. . .

But how. The hot summer rustles
Like a carnival outside my window;
I have long had this premonition
Of a bright day and a deserted house.

This from “Secrets of Craft”

I have no use for regimental odes,
Or the impassioned elegiac hoax.
I make my verses quite beside the point
Made by the just, plain folks.
I wish you knew the kind of garbage heap
Wild verses grow on, paying shame no heed,
Like dandelions yellowing a fence,
Like burdock and bindweed...
An angered yell, the bracing scent of tar,
And walls with runic mildew like a sign...
And soon a tender, testy poem answers
To your delight and mine.

I hear the oriole's always-grieving voice

I hear the oriole's always-grieving voice,
And the rich summer's welcome loss I hear
In the sickle's serpentine hiss
Cutting the corn's ear tightly pressed to ear.
And the short skirts of the slim reapers
Fly in the wind like holiday pennants,
The clash of joyful cymbals, and creeping
From under dusty lashes, the long glance.

I don't expect love's tender flatteries,
In premonition of some dark event,
But come, come and see this paradise
Where together we were blessed and innocent.

I Taught Myself To Live Simply

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life's decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.

These two poems I wrote the other day:

Dying
Today I am silent
as if a brother has died somewhere
I have seen this in my dream many a times:
A child rushes from crowd and asks for direction
then there is no one on the flat dry earth
for many a distance.
I wish it were dark.

Fringes
When terror escapes the face
to a calm realization
it is too late for the dead.
A question nevertheless.
Would he go to the war?
If the realization had preceded the terror
or would he ignore his conscience
and kill
for his nation
for his religion
for his want
later justify his incursions
and spent rest of his life on these shifted spaces
on probation with himself.