Hello All,
Sharing with you 3 poems from my days in Pakistan, and one written
here in Delhi about my nostalgia for Lahore.
Rinku
Rock climbing at Khanpur
Confronting a cliff again. Now. So far from childhood daring
the near-vertical crag
is still an ogre's turret
The baleful basalt spewed igneous in
once tectonic revolt
frozen into inert stone
My toes cramped in unfamiliar shoes
Probe for hesitant holds
in cracks and fissures
Elvis knees, elbows, frantic fingers
Disjoint an awkward ascent
to beckoning anchor-hands above
Seventy sheer feet of hardened lava
Inch after groping inch of I, the pockmarked rock,
sweat-streaming face, and wheat fields receding to paintings below.
For Khanpur rock-climbing pictures see
http://ravi.lums.edu.pk/las/pictures.asp?show_pics=yes&trip_id=75
At Altit Fort, Hunza
Two girls- hazel-haired, apple-cheeked-
Show me their village at the foot of the Altit Fortress-
A rabbit-burrow maze of double-storied adobe huts,
Serpentine tunnels and poplar-wood ladders-
Much like a 'snake & ladders' ludo set.
(Who plays the dice?)
I'm swallowed down dark passages;
Past wrinkled women with threadnet, pillbox caps,
Shrouded in white scarves, who kiss my hand,
And hiss blessings upon my unborn children,
Shaggy goats, who pin me with a gimlet gaze,
Sheared lambs, bleating plaintive in corralled pens,
Until we exit into sudden daylight, the edge,
The precipice- dropping sheer to the snaking Hunza.
The girls display- voila!- their hanging verandah-
A slender ledge and its hand-chiselled, rugged stone seat-
Overlooking the rushing river, the companying Karakoram highway,
And the ant-men by the river-bed going about their antly jobs.
Peering down the vertiginous slope, I am struck by a curious litter-
Not of plastics, gagging polythene bags, ripped metal or tattered rags
But of paper- paper aerofoils- the kind we once made as children-
>From civics books, red-inked exam-sheets, math home-works-
Snared among the shrubs, the sage bushes, the wild grass,
Countless grounded flights, waiting for a freeing, dislodging wind.
Photo of Altit fort and surrounding settlement at
http://www.timandcatherine.com/images/Pakistan/Hunza/altit.jpg
Details of Altit village
http://www.ease.com/~randyj/pakfoto4.htm
Forgive me
If, of all the memories of this foreign land,
This moment, when I sit solitary,
On this wooden bench
By the south side of the football ground,
This late evening, cooling hour,
After the first spattering of summer rain
As the wet breeze suffused with the
Sweet breath of rabel lifts…
Lifts so gently, so gently my
Thinning hair...
Brushing the dust off so many frames
Of summer eves elsewhere, elsewhere…
Fragments of recited Tagore,
Snatches of lost songs,
Lost laughter.
Tea in the verandah,
The setting sun silhouetting
Two Tall chimneys,
The click of a latch on a metal gate,
The crunch of gravel under tired steps...
If, I should hold this moment more dear,
Not us, not our times together here,
Forgive me.
Between People: Post-colonial
Hanging around the church in the museum garden at Lambeth, London
By the tombstones of two gardeners who had brought
Many wild flowers to these sea-lapped isles
I paused pensive by the ankle-high lilacs crowding the graves
Plants absorbed in the sorrow of so much passing
And my sadness passaged rootward,
To Lahore.
That dusty, crumbling, city of ancient lore
Slumbering in the heartland of Punjab,
Land-locked and air-starved,
Dreaming of open seas.
And looking at the lilacs, I wondered, R,
What you of 'enemy soil' India
When you set-up your home in Pakistan
Thought of the land I have left
My L'ORe.
--
"Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of
intense observation." Flaubert
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