Clouds in the valley...

Some say: pale are the colours Of this parched land; All hues, leached from The empty brush of the Maker’s hand Desiccated, the colours live In opals alone from long ago, While the world above, lies in dust Its muted paints now hardly flow   Perhaps, they haven’t   seen The petals of the waratah bloom, That carmine red that wakes up dawn Drains the nights of all their gloom It is the red earth of this land That fills their hearts with crimson dye, The bushfire glow, the ancient souls Their blood that flows, that cannot dry   The waratahs sway silently - What will we know, outsider eyes? What colours to see when all our truth Are shades of empty monochrome lies Yet, they do not judge And all who see the waratah’s gleam Are filled with colours, they wake anew In the cosmos of the Telopea’s dream…   31 st May   The Waratah (Telopea speciosissima) is one of Australia’s most iconic flowers and grows only in ...

  Come to the garden of many hues - You will walk through colours of distant lands, As if by magic, summoned together By garden-fairies, their blossom wands   The hydrangeas, maples, rhododendron souls, Huddle in the Valley of the many ponds, The deciduous turn all autumn-wise Their souls are greyed in aging fronds     The zinnias, poppies, lupins bloom Throughout the year, as seasons turn, The waterlilies inspire, pastel muse – Come, be a Monet, it’s not hard to learn   The hedges, the maze, the waterfall-bridge Assembled all like a jigsaw art, Every step, in beauty sings Wherever you end, that’s where you start   We mortals too can make a fairy land, Oberon himself – wouldn’t he be proud? Titania too, would not be far, Dreaming perhaps in midsummer’s shroud   Come then Hermia, Helena and all, Where else would you rather yearn to be? In Mayfield’s Eden in the tablelands, There’s love-in-idleness ...

I wait for Spring to wake and spark This hamlet full of gold, What better than these daffodils To end the winter’s cold   Come September, these ochre blooms (All shine in Rydal’s hearts, Where lonesome do my mountains end That’s where this valley starts)   Trumpets, doubles, tazettas They bloom in yellow all, In haste, the artist may mistake Instead of Spring, its fall   Large swathes of garden teem and sway As the flowers joyful dance Ten thousand can you see and smile All in a single glance   And for a handful span of weeks A poem resurrects, And Rydal pays her homage through Her golden yellow flecks –   While Lake Lyell not faraway Reminds of Windermere, As devoted readers find indeed Both pilgrimage and prayer   For a forlorn poet, it stirs my heart A writer’s home they chose, And a simple daffodil above A Lotus or a rose   May a thousand muses bless you then, In your mountai...

  At the western tip in the island’s night, Bereft of stars, bereft of light I stared at a sea I couldn’t see, I breathed the emptiness inside me   The saving grace was a distant beam A saber of gold, a lighthouse gleam The world reminding, there’s something to fight – A ray of hope, a distant light   But even there, the truth had a lie, It came, it went, in the blink of an eye As if, the earth will give – but not all you need If you ask for a tree, you’ll find a seed… ____________________________________________   Of all the thoughts that I left behind, It was Gatsby great who came to mind, His light in green across the bay, Always there, but so far away   Where every tale has a Daisy bloom, A spark of light in a sea of gloom, Come, disappear as you please, Or bestow some hope across the seas   Just like the lighthouse spark of gold A tropic of warmth in a bay of cold You can stretch your arms as fa...

I was allowing myself to relax and melt into the sunset colours at Corbyn’s Cove when a familiar voice called me, ‘ Ki Dada, how was your visit to the Cellular Jail?’ It was Mr. Saha who was now becoming a familiar face – I had first met him at the Calcutta Airport when we were both waiting for our flight to Port Blair, then at the long queue outside Cellular Jail and now, again here at Corbyn’s Cove. I realised in my travels around these islands that, most tourism packages here are cookie-cut – sunrise at a particular east-facing location, midday somewhere else and sunset at a west-facing vantage point. Defying this is touristy anathema and severely discouraged by guides and taxi-drivers implying you are very likely to meet your travelling compatriots on these sunrise and sunset points on multiple occasions. We exchanged few notes about the prison, and how much history was held within it when I happened to make a chance remark on the presence of two foreign powers on this tiny arc...

  The fairy tale that is the Blue Mountains, starts to the west of the big sprawling city of Sydney, visible from any elevated vantage point of the city, beckoning the artist inside you to leave the humdrum of the cityscape and walk into the blue, dreamy, misty haze. Many critics may scoff that these are no mountains, just a lofty sandstone ridge – but in the initial years of the colony, this ridge was so dense, the terrain so difficult that it took decades to find a way through the hills, justifying perhaps the moniker of the Mountains. Having visited other towering mountain ranges elsewhere, initially even I was a critic but I remember the day my walls of cynicism faded away for good. Walking close to one of the many bejewelled townships (Leura), I found cool shade on a hot summer day under the red sparkling blooms of a rhododendron tree. Walking farther, I found a small brook, gurgling meditatively, cascading in wanton joy, while gum trees in the glade provided a wonderful san...