At the foothills of Munnar

Mist falling away

From her torso

Lush and dew laden,

The mountain reclines

Dishevelled,

In careless abandon.

Dense, deep, dark

And tousled

Are her wavy tresses

As the cool wind

And drizzle

Shower soft caresses.

Clouds of fog rise

In soft sighs

In the lazy afternoon hour

As she slips in and out

Of a heady,

Lingering sensual languor.

© Sujatha Warrier 2013

[Published in Anthesis – International English Poetry Collection]

The night tonight

The night’s tonight

An overflowing cup

Of sweet sparkling white wine

I drink hard

Into the little hours

And have still not had my fill.

Alone, adrift

In a dark reverie

Drowning a zillion thoughts

I gather anew

Random musings

Drawn from the swirling fathoms.

In vain I seek

To wean off the lure

Of the spilling frothing brim

Still succumb again

To the heady hour

Of the night and the moonlight.

© Sujatha Warrier 2013

[Published in Anthesis – International English Poetry Collection]

Footfalls of Silence

A duet poem is a joy to write when the poets are in tune with each other. Footfalls of Silence is a poem written with Nirmala Sasi Varier for Synthesis, an anthology of duet poems, published by Poiesis Online (Gopakumar Radhakrishnan).

Footfalls of Silence

I tread carefully

lest I trample on the

leaves of your memory,

the murmurs of your presence

still whispering in my ears,

the silence of your absence

resounding in my heart,

your voice in my memory

fading away in timbre,

your call still tugging at my soul.

Lingering with the flies

of fleeting reminiscences

I stall my lonely steps

for your long-awaited footfalls

to catch up with mine,

I pause at every turn

of an unspoken thought

hoping you will intercept

to meet me at this bend or the next

on this road to infinity.

© Nirmala Sasi Varier/Sujatha Warrier 2013

(Included in Synthesis, an anthology of duet poems.)

the attic

Illustration: Bharati Varrier

                                                    

A cluttered storehouse is my attic,

an overflowing archive of rankling thoughts

crammed into dark spaces of isolation.

Accumulations of stubborn grit -

damp, stale, acrid residue from outdated grief -

survive in greasy reticence

the cycles of time and reason.

Rags of unwanted memories,

chunks of broken vases of dreams,

lie abandoned

with old records of truth and fallacies.

Fear, like a creepy multi-legged,

is entrapped in a fuzzy cobweb

of flashbacks and extrapolations.

Will the tarantula crawl out

and traverse the hidden crevices

of the crowded attic of my brain?

I’ll let the darkness, the silence,

and the stillness be,

lest I send the mites –

the qualms –

running all over my raw nerves

in fits of frenzy.

I wish I could vacuum my attic clean.

[Featured as Weekly Poem by Oz Poetic Society for the week February 2-9, 2014] 

A loose page from a forgotten chapter

My Masterpiece is a poem I wrote about two decades ago when I was working as a copy writer in an advertising firm. As most copy writers had during those days and have still, I too had a fantastic rapport with my creative team. We were a team of dreamers, madly in love with colours, forever hungry for new ideas and always ready for the next project. One evening as we were closing for the day, my team mates challenged me to do a painting and bring it to work the next day. Though my skills with the pen were sort of slightly acceptable, I was hopeless with the brush. The poem, if one can call it that (I am reluctant to), was my weak response to their challenge. Written in a hurry and forgotten in a jiffy (or so I thought), I never expected it to emerge as an apparition on the Facebook twenty years later. It did, thanks to Rajesh, one of our team.

To me, the image brings on a sense of nostalgia – no, not because of the poem, but because of the memories of my old Underwood typewriter that had been passed on to me by my grandfather. The image brings memories of days and nights I had typed furiously away on that typewriter. Even the correction of the word ‘bluish’ on the image brings back delightful memories of days when computers were considered alien and a ‘delete’ option just did not exist. Of course, now I am thoroughly spoilt by, and greatly enslaved to, the unlimited possibilities offered by the computer.

Thank you, Rajesh, for bringing back memories of those days of boundless creativity by means of not a ‘mouse’ but pencils, pens, paint, crayons, brushes, knives and whatever else that you could get your hands on. This image reminds me of those days when you didn’t just log out to close for the day but spent about half an hour in the washroom washing off paint from your hands, hair and sometimes your nose too! And the artists’ department was not made up of cubicles, the walls of which did to you what blinkers did to horses. Artists’ room used to be a creative haven though in utter disarray, or rather, a colourful chaos.

In those days, every work we did had an interesting story behind it. And these stories cemented the team bond. Perhaps this piece of paper is testimony to the bond – and the copies of our numerous works and other bits and pieces that I have still treasured in my safety locker!

For those who would like to read a more legible version: 

My Masterpiece

With the fine feathers

of subtle imagination

I paint a picture new,

strange, intense and sublime,

with the crimson of twilight,

the scarlet of the dawn,

the depth of midnight blue

and the ash of cloudy monsoon,

the tinted white frays

of the bluish green seas,

the spreading soft yellow

of the slowly ageing leaves,

the greenness of the ferns,

the roses of the roses

and all the soft crayons

of many a lovely dream.

Oh! Only if I could

create this masterpiece

with all the dazzling hues

that my eyes daily perceive!