GEETHANJALI DILIP

 

Walking The Trail

 

I choose this day

When the sky is overcast,

Not pouring down like a runaway bride,

But waiting to dress her head with a pearly misty veil of hope,

Blurry but looming like it wants to be the shamiana of celebrations,

Letting the hazy grey rays pass through its resolve,

The murk is Poetry,

 

I choose such a day to walk the trail for the earth is still damp,

I love to hear the squelching slush as if I’ve planted kisses on her forehead,

Except my feet are my lips,

Leaving impressions like a child leaves its prattle on a mother’s heart,

 

I watch the bunch of ferns trailing ahead of me, bent in a graceful curtsy,

Giving its colour to this earth,

As I watch fragments of the teal sky glow in my eyes, through the verdant tapestry,

I breathe the damp air,

Till the poem tells me that the trail has ended and that the stars are out,

I walk back all the way kissing Mother Earth with my feet.

Mothers love that too.

© ® Geethanjali Dilip

 

The Sea Now

 

Is bevelled glass ruffled up like ice blue permed hair,

Sometimes the real seems like an illusion

The sea forgot that it runs in me, lapping gently at times,

At times roaring away screaming through moon phases,

Sometimes pretending to be a lagoon dappled with turquoise tint,

Trapping fragments of sky-high dreams,

Mostly trying to merge with other seas but islands embrace it,

As palms sway in my eyelashes streaming its brine so warm and tepid,

My cheeks à blue hemisphere!

 

The sea forgets its poem that it wrote night after night,

Crumpled the aluminum foil it became in moonlight,

And threw itself on a cliff that stood testimony to its monologues,

Stifling my chest and marauding my faith that I’m the earth,

It then gushes out in cascades throttling a song waiting to sing itself to a star-spangled sky,

Till the salt tingles my tongue and I drink its stories enough, to say I’m not thirsty for its brine anymore.

© ® Geethanjali Dilip

 

Downpour

 

The whispers in the foliage grew louder and louder.

It was time to let the stories out,

Of how the Sun kissed them all with equanimity,

Even in the depths of the forests where green was more like black ,

Where bird songs echoed with narrations of blue skies, desert   sands and stormy seas,

Where tides leapt up ambitiously to spray shafts of rainbows,

Where humans turned a deaf ear to seas screaming for restoring life back again,

As gulls dropped off from the skies in anguish,

It was time to let out stories of how their legs were hacked and their torsos felled mercilessly,

As they all left their laments in passing clouds that gathered around,

Mourning and brooding for their angst and their desperation to breathe,

And in sheer camaraderie they gurgled and thundered down,

As the cacophonous clatter of liberation poured outside my window as monsoon rain,

Pounding into my veins and arteries that elements are our first guests,

And I stepped outside welcoming a blessed downpour of forest prayers.

© ® Geethanjali Dilip

 

The Flight

 

When the moon has risen high up in the sky,

Glowing, mesmerising, gliding slowly by,

Sometimes only a blurry shadow leads the staggering feet,

From time to time clouds of silver lining set sail in a fleet,

 

Eyes fail to look up at this vision magnificent,

In its silence this mother of pearl moon pendant,

Just keeps the darkness away though sleep reigns,

While the perfect picture outside the window remains frozen as the soul slumber feigns.

 

Then it is already daylight and colours get stark and garish,

The subtle, the gentle and the delicate stay behind the light like a maiden squirmish,

Till one day the whole being is an ocean leaping up to feel the moonlight,

While the shores let it rush in restless tides of emotions in a desperate flight.

© ® Geethanjali Dilip

 

The Dialogue

 

A cluster of silhouetted cypresses holding hands in a thicket,

Posing for the moon that spotlights from afar, where rings the cricket,

A quiet county that puts up its feet in a lazy boy,

Of the beings who stretch in fatigue from a routine to employ,

A rabbit scurries hearing my feet on the sidewalk,

And I stop to stare at its gleaming eyes with it to talk,

But I intimidate it for there zooms a car turning the corner,

I walk away my legs now in a hurry too as I saunter,

I look up at the starlit night sky where time doesn't exist,

And here I am fenced in barbed wire earthly time to resist,

Eyes to shut, breath to take and the night is gone,

Moon to fade in daylight and somewhere else to shine on,

Her dialogue with the tide and horizons only she can understand,

And here on Earth eyes wonder at the gush of seas on the mute sand.

But somehow my eyes light up with the dazzling ray soul to awaken,

Darkness of the night effaced, a new day and no one is forsaken!

© ® Geethanjali Dili

GEETHANJALI DILIP

   

GEETHANJALI DILIP: A professor of French Salem, India heading Zone Francofone, is a published poet featured in several international co- authored anthologies. She is the curator of The Yercaud Poetry Festival. Her solo anthologies “‘Geethatmaa” « Hansa Geetham « and «  Poetry Voice- Geeth Dhvani », “ Soul Riff- Atmatarang , “ Rosée-The Dewdrop have earned great reviews. Donning several prestigious awards for poetry and creative writing, believes that poetry connects the world, as she lives by her mantra, » Bloom where you are planted «