A tiny bird named Zitting Cisticola

A peculiar little bird –that was once referred to as Fantail warbler- about the size of sparrow found in plains and bushy terrain. It prefers a kind of sedentary lifestyle and therefore becomes difficult to spot, save for the fact of its amusing flight that draws attention. It shoots up and flies a distance and falls straight back into the bush. This bird makes a delicate and beautiful nest composed of cobwebs, growing grass and even vegetables. The chicks are known to make hissing noise –like that of a snake – when disturbed. 

The invincible Coorg of Western Ghats:

Chakke kari

Chada, chada, beva.

Kambala kari

Guda, guda, beva.

Translation

When the fruit of jack tree boils

It sings “chada chada”

When the kambala fruit boils

It sings “guda guda”

Very few Indians except maybe the Kannadigas know much about the Kodavas (Coorg). Unless of course if you have spend some time in Armed forces. Kodavas pride themselves for being warrior class. Coorg is a tiny district tucked away in the south west Karnataka bordering Kerala (this blogger had covered the yearly traditional family hockey -played between clans within Kodavas- almost 5years back). Coorg a fertile land with bounties of nature that kodava song or palame almost always opens with, expression of delight for the pleasant land they dwell that provide them with all material prosperity and comfort. 

Nothing higher can be seen,

Though one look through all the earth

Than the Mahameru hill.

Brightest amongst the flower trees

Is the brilliant Sampige.

So in all the fertile earth

Coorg a necklace is of gold.

Some children’s rhymes translated (it need be pointed out that all these poems are wonderful rhymes in original, that has playful nature embodied in its construction)

The fingers

The little finger nail is small,

The finger for the ring is gold,

The middle finger loves coins,

The fourth is Kotera,

The thumb is Murutika,

And both are gone for cheese.

Colors

The mother is black,

The daughter is white,

And the grand-daughter is like gold !

Little chickens

An old story, an old story !

Clever Brahman, an old story!

What shall i say?

I know none.

Little chickens! Little chickens !

Sing me a song!

What can i sing?

Pyong ! Pyong!

Coorg Huttari or Harvest Song

Sun and moon the season make,

Ruler over all the sky they take.

God is lord of heaven and earth.

All the joyous earnest toil

happy ryots give the soil,

our rich land is fully worth.

midst the beauteous forest trees

brightest to the eye that sees

is the brilliant Sampige

sweeter than sweetest rose,

purer than the mountain snows,

better than mere words may say

thus is Coorg the noblest land,

rich and bright as golden band

on the neck where youth doth stay

in this happy lovely realm

no misfortunes overwhelm.

Live and proper while you may !

“A stanza from different huthri

Come on, friends, lets all sing louder

Let all our bunches of canes clatter;

Come on sing all, louder and louder,

Let the gods in high heavens too hear”

Listen how the sound resounds all over,

The country’s cream of youth is here;

That one legged man too moves around,

Those squint eyed women and the blind.

Either in or off the field, all are dancing,

And a large crowd is excitedly watching”

The above song consist of words that rhymes with the rhythms of clattering cane sticks.

Gods here come from Kerala!!!

Iguthappa temple in Coorg is a prominent place of worship for Kodavas located near salubrious Kakkabe. Iguthappa the main deity of the temple is also the chief divinity for Kodavas, iggu in kodava is grain and thappa means to give. It looked like a temple that seems to evoke favor with snake gods.
Coorg is a pleasant place to roam around charmingly green and agreeable people. So while I was in Medikeri took a bus to Kakkabe, at a tea shop I asked a man, who not surprisingly happened to be a Malayali, about Iguthappa temple and presiding deity and so on. Since there was ample time –as the buses are infrequent in this part of the world –he got talking. He said, what I thought was a hilarious irony, gods here come from Kerala. He winked, probably realizing there is a humor here, and next few minutes narrated to me rather excitedly about Igguthappa who had left Kerala because he found the climate at Coorg agreeable (surely a godly enough reason!!), he was accompanied by his brothers and sister. Tired by walking for days they camped near Kakkabe, they milked the stray cow and with the rice they were carrying prepared payasam. They needed plate so they asked the owner of the property for plantain leaves who angered by the intrusion refused. Iguthappa did what gods are good at –atleast in this part of the world, he cursed. Henceforth no plantain will grow in the property; it remains so to this day. It is stuff that makes miracles I guess. All important dates are ascertained by the priest through Kerala Panchang system.

The bus halted at the dead end on the edge of the hill at the entrance of the temple, further up seemed like forest that I came to know later was Aiyengeri forest. The surroundings of the temple are sparsely inhabited by people who are into coffee and other plantations. There was a small crowd in the temple, seemed like monthly gathering or something of that sort. Famished and tired the free refreshments at the temple courtyard caught my unadulterated attention, after the fill I explored the place. You could mistake yourself to be in Kerala, the temple is in typical Kerala architect – that itself was influenced by early Buddhism. Deepastambam, vilakumadam so on, low lying triangular roof and space around the main shrine (chuttabalam) for people to rest. Like temples in Kerala devotees waited for the priest to open the nada and peek in from a rather narrow door. After an hour or so the deity was taken out for a procession around the shrine. Now this is where the Coorgy flavor overtakes and differ much from Kerala. As soon as the

idol is taken out for procession instead of stern demeanor the priest is expected to maintain, as is the case in Kerala temples -sometimes these are carried on elephants with accompaniments of nadaswaram and chenda in almost businesslike manner. The priest start a jig to my utmost consternation, he put a step here and a step there and rushed as abruptly, with the idol still mounted on his head, to one corner of the premise, while the acolytes cautioned the crowd to give way. As abruptly he started he halted at one end of the courtyard as a woman whispered her woes the priest was instant with his solution, others joined in. This went on for much of the noon as the priest circumnutated the devotees, halting for those in immediate need of favor. 

Lunch was arranged at the adjoining hall, devotees backed up as volunteers and everything handled in clockwork precision. After the lunch –spartan but delicious, I decided to walk back the verdant route, about a Km or two down caught up with a bus and was back in my hotel by the evening. Late into the night a thought start to pervade my mind…Coorg could be the place I might finally settle down!! But on a second thought you can only settle if you are unsettled!! 

From my scribble pad...

Little girl in the garden

She talks to the flowers

and to herself, and the damselfly

and all that there is to talk to

of course she realises

that language never been a barrier

everything right in its place to be picked.

and arranged into her world.

A gaiety the tiny body carries

much beyond herself,

one step back, a step in front

dance she beget and forgotten at the instance.

In the late noon of her life

when time has signalled its triumph

she will recall that everything was right in the garden

.

White-napped woodpecker: its family time!!

You would mostly find White-naped Woodpecker in groups comprising mostly of siblings or parents, sometimes even unrelated young ones which they are known to tutor. Seen in well wooded country they are quite active and loud. I am getting quite lucky with woodpeckers and this one might be the seventh or eighth specie I am writing in this site. Since then I am able to gather one more information about Woodpecker and that is they tap the wood-a hollow sound, also to let know their territory. 

Eugenio Montale: Bring me the sunflower that I may transplant it

Bring me the sunflower that I may transplant it

in my saline burned ground,

and that it might display all day to the blue expanses

of the sky the anxiety of its pale yellow face.

Things that are dark long for brightness,

the bodies exhaust themselves in a flowing

of colours: these become music. To fade away

is therefore a chance among chances.

Bring me the plant which leads

to where the blonde transparencies appear

and where life dissolves like essence;

bring me the sunflower insane with light.

One of the website i visit atleast once in a fortnight is the Nobel Prize website. It’s about some amazing people. Awards may or may not be important and there may be many brilliant people who may not have got awards but the fact remains that Nobel Prize winners are mostly some very remarkable people, who have done some amazing stuff. In my younger days despite problems and craps one face in life one thing i kept an eye on was who were the Nobel Prize winners and what they have done and its implications, as also what they have to say. Many a times i used to keep paper cutting, now of course internet has made it easier. And yes their speeches became important reference points, as also initiating myself into refined reading. 

It is while i was visiting the website the other day that i came across this Italian poet (must add Swedish poet Martinson about whom i wrote in my earlier blog was also a find from this website). Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) served as an Infantry officer during World War I, when he was asked to join the Fascist forces during late 1930s he quit public life and devoted his attention to translate Shakespeare and Eliot into Italian, in the meantime he wrote some wonderful poems. Montale once remarked, "I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me." 

The Lemons

Listen, the prize poets stroll

only among the trees

with uncommon names:

boxwood, privet, acanthus.

Me, I love roads that run out

among grassy ditches into

mud-puddles where kids

hunt skinny eels; lanes

that follow field-banks down

through beds of reeds and

end up in back gardens

among the lemon trees.

Best if the birds' chatter-prattle

is hushed, swallowed up

by the blue: then you'll hear

– clearer in the still air – the whisper

of companionable branches,

and catch a sense of that smell

that can't tear itself from earth,

drenching you in edgy pleasure.

Here, by some miracle, the battle

between one distracting passion

and another dies down, and here

even we who are poor

pick up our share of wealth –

and it's the scent of lemons.

Look, in these silences

which things sink into

and seem on the verge of

opening their closest secret,

you'd expect once in a while

to uncover some mistake

in nature, the world's still point,

some weak link, the loose thread

that leads us at last

to the heart of truth. Eyes

rummage in every corner:

the mind seeks agrees argues

with itself in this perfume

that floats – as day fades –

over everything; a silence

in which, in every dwindling

human shadow, a troubled

divinity could be seen.

But the image fades, and time

takes us back to the din of cities

where you see the sky only

in bits and pieces, off up

among the chimneys. Rain then

wears the earth out, dreary winter

settles down around the houses,

light grows miserly, the soul bitter,

till one day, through a half-

shut gate, you see

among the trees in someone's yard

the yellows of lemons –

and the heart's ice melts,

and with their music

the golden trumpets of sunshine

blow your bones wide open.

Do not ask us the word which in every way 

Do not ask us the word which in every way

our shapeless soul perhaps measures, and in letters of fire

may declaim it and shine like a crocus

lost in the centre of a dusty field. 

Ah! the man who goes away sure,

to others and to himself a friend,

and cares not about his shadow which the dog days

reflect across a plasterless wall!

Ask us not for the formula to open worlds for you,

only some syllable distorted and dry like a twig.

This alone is what we can tell you today,

that which we are not, that which we do not want.

Doubt

I was giving a lecture

to the "Friends of Cacania"

on the subject "Is Life Likely?"

when I remembered I

was totally agnostic,

love and hate in equal parts and the outcome

unsure, depending on the moment.

Then I decided five minutes

were enough--

two and a half for the thesis

two and a half for the antithesis

this was the only homage possible

for a man without qualities.

I spoke exactly thirty-five sconds.

And when I said

that yes and no were look alikes

shouts and whispers interrupted my talk

and I awoke. It was the most laconic dream

of my life, maybe the only one not devoid

of "quality."

Often I have encountered the evil of living

Often I have encountered the evil of living:

it was the strangled stream which gurgles,

it was the crumpling sound of the dried out

leaf, it was the horse weaty and exhausted. 

The good I knew not, other than the miracle

revealed by divine Indifference:

it was the statue in the slumber

of the afternoon, and the cloud, and the high flying falcon. 

I recall your smile, and it is for me a lucid water 

I recall your smile, and it is for me a lucid water

Discovered by chance between the pebbles,

a meagre mirror in which to watch a reflection of the ivy,

and with it all I embrace a quiet white sky.

Such is my memory; I would not know how to describe,

or distant from your face as it expresses the free, innocent spirit,

Or are you a wanderer who challenges the evil of the world

and who carriers his suffering with himself like a talisman.

But this I can say to you, that the memory of your image

engulfs the animosity in a big, calm wave,

and which your image brings to my vivid memory

Openhearted like the tip of a young palm…

Winter lingers on. The sun is doled out

Winter lingers on. The sun is doled out

with a dropper. Isn't it strange that we,

lords and perhaps inventors of the universe,

to understand a piece of it, must trust

the charlatans and soothsayers mushrooming everywhere?

It seems obvious the Gods

are beginning to tire of their presumptive

children or wards.

Even clearer that, Gods or demigods,

they in turn have quit

their employers, if they ever had any.

But. . .

The Wall

To lie in shadow on the lawn

By a crumbling wall, pale and withdrawn

And spy in the weeds the gliding snake

And hear the rustle blackbirds make –

To watch in the cracked earth and the grass

Battalions of red ants at drill,

That break and form ranks, pass and repass

In busy marches on some tiny hill –

To catch, each time the leaves blow free,

The faint and pulsing motion of the sea,

While ceaseless, tremulous and shrill,

The cicadas chatter on the bald hill –

Rising, to wander in bewilderment

With the sun's dazzle, and the sorry thought

How all our life, and all its labors spent,

Are like a man upon a journey sent

Along a wall that's sheer and steep and

endless, dressed

With bits of broken bottles on its crest.

From my scribbling pad.....

Mishap with the shaving razor 

Scrapped skin pinch a drop

of blood out the throbbing vein

from the dreary task of oxygen carriers

nano matters that cleave life from death

ferrous ignited RBCs glisten under the bulb.

Aeons ago,

Time, Space and Matter encounter the laws of nature

meanwhile supernovas billions of light years afar

let itself die and condense into an

arrangement that let butterfly hold its colours.

Is it a star or is it divine

that dance in my blood?

Yellow-wattled Lapwing is not into demonstrations !

I am sure most readers of this blog are aware of Red-wattled Lapwing, a common bird that many might have even spotted, but Yellow-wattled though common in the peninsula is a difficult sighting partly due to the fact that it is much silent as also found in dry open country unlike Red-wattled -that is loquacious to an irritating level as also a demonstrative bird often sighted near water bodies. Smaller than Red-wattle Yellow-wattled Lapwings has obvious distinction of yellow colored wattle –a fleshy extension in front of eyes that meet above the beak. An interesting fact about this bird is their eggs are pyriform, that is, broad and obtuse at one end and sharp pointed at the other. So while hatching the pointed side is towards the ground thus taking minimum brooding space. 

Gerard Manley Hopkins: the words are wild! 

Nothing is so beautiful as spring-

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest who wrote poems, you would expect his poems to be on clichéd line, you know about religion-morality and so on, even this blogger did and was almost dismissive in the beginning until I got myself into his world. The quaintness of divinity reflected in all can be charming (reminds me of bhakti poems). Rarely have i read someone so experimental and innovative, he even created his own words, his own language, his “inscape”. Hopkin writes “...all therefore that I think of doing is to keep my verses together in one place- at present I have not even correct copies-, that, if anyone should like, they might be published after my death. And that again is unlikely, as well as remote... No doubt my poetry errs on the side of oddness. I hope in time to have a more balanced and Miltonic style. But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of calling inscape is what I above all aim at in poetry. Now it is the virtue of design, pattern, or inscape to be distinctive and it is the vice of distinctiveness to become queer. This vice I cannot have escaped.” He writes somewhere else “....but take breath and read it with the ears, as I always wish to be read, and my verse becomes all right.”

It need be noted here that he achieved acclaim posthumously since he held the view that publishing the poems would violate the humility required from him as a priest. What enchantingly uninhibited poems these.... 

Spring and Fall

(to a young child)

Margret, are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leaves, like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Áh! as the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you will weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sorrow’s springs are the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It is the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

To Christ our Lord

I Caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom

of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend:

the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, -the achieve of, the mastery of the

thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a

billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: sheer plod makes plough down

sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things-

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim:

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and

plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Caged Skylark

As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage

Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house,

dwells-

That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;

This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.

Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage,

Both sing sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells,

Yet both droop deadly sometimes in their cells

Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.

Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest—

Why, hear him, hear him babble and drop down to his nest,

But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.

Man's spirit will be flesh-bound when found at best,

But uncumbered: meadow-down is not distressed

For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bones risen.

Another scribble from my writing pad...

Wild flowers

Who knows, what will become of us

perhaps it will be the seed dropped from the bird

that sprout into wild flowers

all senses capsulated

in a sway in the breeze

The Blackbirds of Nilgiris

If you been to Nilgiri mountains and surrounding chances are that you will encounter this bird so often that you will start to mistake it for myna. The Blackbirds of Nilgiris are lighter in colour than one found in Europe, they are ashy brown with a distinctive reddish-orange bills. They could be seen hopping on the ground I found this one while on a morning walk it was quite actively searching the place, just about the time it was getting suspicious of me i got clicking. Must say quite a strong flier this bird. 

Nicolas Guillen: Voice of Cuba

Yoruba i am, i weep in Yoruba

Lucumi.

Since i am a Yoruba from Cuba,

I want to move up to Cuba my lament in Yoruba,

move up my happy lament in Yoruba

that goes out from me

Nicolas Guillen (1902-1989) a Cuban poet is considered as one of the outstanding poets of twentieth century, he is acclaimed in Cuba as National poet. His poems are innovative and rich in musicality (which i guess must have been lost in translation), he adopted a popular Cuban musical form: the son (that combines African and Spanish elements). Guillen’s father was a senator and editor of newspaper who was killed by soldiers (for protesting against Garcia Menocal who continued to occupy the presidency despite losing election). Unfortunately for him as Castro’s troop advanced towards liberating Cuba from repressive Batista he was arrested in Brazil for his political activities, and had to be in exile for six years until the revolution in 1959.

Fidel,

wears the name of Cuba

forever on his faithful chest

Fidel,

was the one who exalted soil

to the height of myrtle and laurel

Fidel,

the one who raised up a new homeland

without hatred, murderous crime or bitterness

Fidel.

Once back in Cuba Guillen had taken a full circle: it was soldiers who had killed his father and after two decades he dedicates to them. His tribute also includes poems on Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Nancy Morejon, Felix Varela and other Cuban Heroes. Guillen’s poems reflect the essential character of Cuban people, the developments that have impact on Cuban people framed his concerns.

I Don’t Know Why It Seems To You

I don’t know why it seems to you,

soldier, that i hate you,

since we are the same thing,

I,

you.

You are poor, so am i;

I am kept down, so are you;

how has it occurred to you,

soldier, that i hate you?

It hurts me that sometimes you

forget who i am;

caramba since i am you,

the same as you are me.

.......

.......

Wisp, Little Shoot...

Wisp, little green

shoot, in the dark earth:

of which miniscule forest

are you baobab, how many

bird-fleas nest

in your strong branches?

Wisp, little green

shoot, in the dark earth,

I, sleeping in your shade,

to dream, cast off

beneath the moon.

Calm Breeze That Hardly Moves...

Clamed breeze that hardly moves

the flower,

fine breath of the garden

that softly pass,

come and push my boat,

trapped in the motionless sea.

Carry me, powerful,

in your minimal wings,

oh, breeze, fine breath,

clamed breath that hardly moves

the flowers.

Sugarcane

The black man

next to the cane field.

The Yankee

over the cane field.

The land

under the cane field

Blood

that goes out from us!

Problems Of Underdevelopment

Monsieur Dupont calls you uneducated

because you don’t know which was

the favourite grandchild of Victor Hugo.

Herr Muller has started shouting

because you don’t know the day

(the exact one) when Bismarck died.

Your friend Smith,

English or Yankee, i don’t know,

becomes incensed when you write shell.

(it seems that you hold back an ‘L’

and that besides you pronounce it chel)

O.K. So what?

When it’s your turn,

have them say cacarajicara,

and where is the Aconcagua

and who was Sucre,

and where on this planet

did Marti die.

And please:

make them always talk to you in Spanish.

Guadeloupe W I

The blacks, working

next to the ship. The Arabs, selling,

the French, strolling and resting,

and the sun, blazing.

The sea goes to bed

in the port. The air toasts

the palm tree... I shout: Guadeloupe!, but no one answers.

The ship leaves, ploughing the impassive waters with foamy noise.

There, the blacks keep on working,

the Arabs selling,

the French strolling and resting,

and the sun blazing.

Before i move out of this blog i recall buying a book Blackbird Bye Bye (April Bernard), probably the earliest of books i have bought most likely from Chennai. What events led me to buy this book i don’t recall. It couldn’t be with someone since i don’t prefer company while buying books. Intriguing since i wasn’t really much into English poetry those days...bit of Tagore and some Malayalam from some magazines while travelling were my indulgences, i was in my early 20s roaming around for job- quite far from nuanced world of poetry!!. Whatever may be the case this book has been with me for a long time now. And i am not complaining, it has some beautiful poems. The collection also has won Walt Whitman Award...i particularly like this poem

Satan Moves Mysteriously

We seek a slogan, and find only the old ones.

We need revolution, but settle

for bad manners. Who will be the one

to strip the uniform of its stars,

splash mud on the trousers of El Exigente,

while the state borders are ringed

by lethal picket fence posts?

A few men have been towering over us,

blocking the light in the city streets.

Meanwhile, hands are blown off, crops die,

Buildings implode, perishing, want, and sorrow follow.

Not enough left in my mouth to spit.