Hands

Newsflash: "On an average
seventy five percent of the daily eggs
survive the wrath of failing hands,
this means that
hands fail occasionally."

You can turn the soil with your own hands,
with a sublime resolve,
and wait for the rain,
wait for the avian visitors,
wait for the decay and rebirth,
"Insects may have laid eggs on the corn cobs."

My hands were quiet that day,
they did not write,
did not persuade,
witnessing the weeping clouds,
for they hang in shame,
Not a single word from the thunder,
Not a lightning strike,
I stood transfixed with my hurricane lamp.

The dramatist's hands failed to record
the sound of the failing thunder,
of the crackling of the burning leaves,
The records were filled with muffled cries,
The barking watchdog's warning:
"You've never heard the thunder sing."

And then it rained,
It rained because she could not sleep,
Her longing for rain corresponded
with her dried bathroom taps.
She may have conjured the clouds to weep again,
She might have been a poet
perhaps locked in a metaphor,
Silent as if
she whispered to the soundless walls,
Because the Walls were her witness in longing.

"You could have cried, you know,
at least, she should have cried,"
remarked a loudmouth on her expressionlessness,
still curious, it asks:
"How can that be?
How did she censure her loneliness?"
She basks at their new found attentiveness
for her, and then she masks:
"They were just field observations,"
she thought, "I just refused to acknowledge
the presence of bees."

Her eyes whispered again to the walls:
"That some eyes perform surgery,
bend the rules for a harddisk memory,
willing to record this self-knowledge,
attesting worth to self-probity,
It might have been a small memory stick
testimonials of the voyeur's fantasies,
watching a mute screen,
of images of constricting torsos
of demi-humans,
their faces obscured,
feminine chests in surviving the plastic bloom,
with a tagline; 'waiting to be devoured'.
The police, therefore, in their most poetic retort,
wrote: 'Nude bust, voyeur arrested'.

Just how limiting is this nudity,
when my hands remain empty,
and when my underarms become your
object of affection,
My souls was still stuck in a wire mesh,
Didn't you know?", she posed.

The walls betrayed, but
they whispered her secrets to the other walls
witnessing other secrets,
The walls blamed:
"The hands never failed to exchange
notes of sadness,
for a certain poem lives under a paperweight,
and others sieze a moment from thee."

(Graffiti of the parrot and the smiley is from CEPT University, Ahmedabad, India)