When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

~ W. B. Yeats

Among the men and women the multitude,

I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs,

Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am,

Some are baffled, but that one is not--that one knows me.

Ah lover and perfect equal,
I meant that you should discover me so by faint indirections,
And I when I meet you mean to discover you by the like in you.

~ Walt Whitman

The mountains in autumn
there are so much fallen leaves,
- looking for my lost lover
I cannot find the path.

~author unknown

Living in this world -
to what shall I compare it?
Its like a boat
rowing out at break of day,
leaving no trace behind.

~ Sami Mansei


Though I go to you
ceaselessly along dream paths,
the sum of those trysts
is less than a single glimpse
granted in the waking world.

Another Morning

It’s a great feeling to savour coffee sip by sip early in the morning
recalling some stanza or the other from Neruda’s poetry.
It’s like stepping into life anew that very moment.
Mind and body lighten and effortlessly mingle with the thin morning fog.
Leaves of different colours fall in every house front and form a wonderful kalamkaree.
A housewife, hand on her hip, tries to sweep drowsiness and laziness away.
Thin fog settles like kindness on plants, trees and flowers.
Perhaps everything loses its natural hardness and turns gloriously soft in the morning.
That first awakened beauty of the morning world of
housewives, children, puppies, birds is absolutely astounding.
Having melted and letting off steam, we move about in bed delicately like warm lakes
Her hands move delicately to wash the faces of housefronts
clean, draw a few lines of muggu and set out with a whip.
By then we would get together by the pomegranate tree,
around a winter fire warming our hands, feet and face
and welcome fire into ourselves.
Some mother would have slit the sky with her fingertip.
Tightening its fist and crying lightly
A beautiful baby would appear over our heads.
Even if all the poets the world over wrote a poem each on the morning hour
It would still remain untouched, unsmelt, wonderful and fascinating
The entire body would reduce itself to a small poem and be moved.
Whosoever it is, he has to take a handful of water
Pay homage to life and only then move on to live.

~K. Siva Reddy

Water Lily

My whole life is mine, but whoever says so
will deprive me, for it is infinite.
The ripple of water, the shade of the sky
are mine; it is still the same, my life.

No desire opens me: I am full,
I never close myself with refusal-
in the rythm of my daily soul
I do not desire-I am moved;

by being moved I exert my empire,
making the dreams of night real:
into my body at the bottom of the water
I attract the beyonds of mirrors...

~Rainer Maria Rilke


ah... how delicious is this poem