Days Are Whirlpools: Three Poems by K.S. Subramanian
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry: ‘Let me not do a U-turn of my neck / to see the past, skill sets that / lost their spell in time, high hopes / Slithering down a slippery slope’
On the scales
Days are whirlpools, wink and fade.
Never bugged me on age, aging.
Possibly I never aged in mind ‘cause
Years flowed in a stream through
eye moistened, often on lost causes.
A mind haloed with green foliage never ages.
They were not meant to be lost.
I didn’t pursue them, not seriously enough;
Clouds sometimes have rain in
their bowels, sometimes not.
When limbs weaken, bones sag
Eye loses its urge to see, zoom in
And draw a beauty for its own radiance.
A striped gorgeous kookabura
wings away laughing.
Do its flapping wings berate
my wanderings, that my regrets
have no more moisture
than the dried mud cakes on its bed.
I didn’t count the years then,
Nor do I now,
My wins and losses set against
a thinning horizon.
*
To live life all over again
Let me not do a U-turn of my neck
to see the past, skill sets that
lost their spell in time, high hopes
Slithering down a slippery slope
scorned by ingrate times that
sang an ode to Darwin; warm a
sacrosanct chair with an emaciated stare,
or a rickety one unfit for your pedigree.
My chagrined inner voice mocked,
“Fruit is not the milestone, karma is”
My fellow mortals were never shy
of bending our backs, cerebral sparks
that lighted many, pleased a few.
But landed as always where accursed
with a sickening thud and inner prod:
“This is not what you panted for….”
Soon, days wove into burdened years
when stars shone less in a dark dawn,
halo eclipsed in shadowed noon.
Spring in step lost in sweeping desert wind.
An old raging song that stirred the chords
Of a crowd lost suddenly in the eerie.
Years later had an awkward timbre
When crooned on a changed string.
I sense the new faces, old hopes
straining to carve a portrait, new light.
I go back to my dusky sky to see where I
slipped amid the stars that once shone.
*
Whir in the orbit
The fan’s blades are still.
They sense they will swing
only when I want to warm up,
be ready to set about my day.
When still, they look like a yogi,
In evanescent reverie,
an unblemished lotus in the pond.
Untroubled or dismayed by
the coagulating dust on its frame,
Any more than shriveled leaves
Eviscerate the lotus.
Time breathes on them,
leaves no moss on their being.
The day comes alive only
when one sets on his toes.
Else it is as just vivacious
as the whir in the orbit.
***
K.S. Subramanian has published two volumes of poetry, Ragpickers and Treading on Gnarled Sand through the Writers Workshop, Kolkata, India. He is a retired Senior Assistant Editor from The Hindu and lives in Chennai, India. His poems and short stories have appeared in Museindia, Kitaab, Indian Ruminations, Different Truths and Borderless Journal. His essays and blogs can be found at boloji.com.
