Clouds in the valley...

The rains are gone, leaving colours behind - Hues that melancholic clouds couldn’t see As autumn beckons, the plateau now fills: A thousand flowers in a dazed melee   Like a pointillist painting all sprung to life, This wildflower land is splashed in pink, With love like this, you smell, you smile, Then in lost basalt hills, you see and sink   In August’s grace, these lands bring life, Remorse perhaps of the indigo days, Now the winds are filled with pastel hues That rise and ebb in fractal waves   But where will you be when these colours fade? Will you return again with a monsoon sigh? The rains will return, year after year But some parched hearts will perhaps be dry…   Written in memory of the Kaas Plateau in the Satara region that bursts with wildflowers after the monsoons around August

In musty browned pages old, Can you smell the past? A life passing by along, In slow-motion, un-fast   That musky smell that liberates The letters on a page, While one fettered soul finds out Keys to his own cage   In trapped a fragrance of the past, What do you really see? Deep the sleepy, sodden roots Of an empty winter’s tree   There standing in a book stall In a sea of pages pale, Bits of someone else’s life Left hanging in a sale   That smell on College Street is then, Something else you know The petrichor of life itself, Beating, heartbeat slow   A teardrop here, a scribble there A lipstick stain as well A petaled hope forgotten long, Oh, what story would it tell   A number pencilled long ago, What was that raspy voice? Did someone even make that call – Was it a hopeless choice?   Then, to caress that dog-ear That another soul had made, As if, an unknown lover lost That t...

  I saw the movie Peter Pan For the first time just today, One of those childhood memories, The best that I must say   A lovely book was all I had And what joy for me it brought – To sail away to Neverland, With Wendy and the lot   Like children all, I too had dreamt Of pirates in the bay, Mermaids in the green lagoon, And Injuns far away   To fight the nasty pirates all With the lost boys by your side, And in the end, in pixie dust A flying ship to ride   To get a book was treasure all For the kids in back our age, No TV, but your mind was all - And the world grew in a page   The memories came back all today On a weekend evening, My little one had to see something And Pan came ‘pon the screen     The pages from my childhood days, Sprung back to life anew, Tinker, Tiger, Darlings all, Were not the only ones who flew   Yet, deep within, I felt the truth The melancholy th...