sanarao.wordpress.com

abandoning and moving with bag and baggage

to 

sanarao.wordpress.com

The West Indies

In order to be sane,

we should stay on different continents.

As the distance decreases,

sanity lifts up her skirt, and exits, as though escaping

to more pliable dwellings.

And so, for further references

if you find me delirious,

go away to Europe, Africa,

or better still go to the West Indies.

Pahasu House

An eyelash, drifts through the stripes of dust and gold that

a window, fourteen feet high, once threw on my old bed.

The arches of my ancestral home, still bent low with mourning,

and the loss of ninety three or so years of service to a pearl bearded man.

The room now lies bare, and dusty,

that eyelash has settled in the clockwork of that old winding table clock, with a radium dial.

Someday perhaps, in a sunday antique market,

the eyelash, will be released again,

lumbering with it an outdated wish.

The Obligation to be Happy by Linda Pastan

It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.


And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice—
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it
on my narrow shoulders again—
a knapsack heavy with gold coins.
I stumble around the house,
bump into things.
Only Midas himself
would understand.

Why does death endear instantly,
a person, that my entire childhood has run away from?
Why do i now think of a billions things i could have learned from him,
and a million stories he could've told?
just when he has gone?

The person who made my father from his being,

Did i do justice to his story, by never even giving it a chance?
was it the 70 odd years that stood monolithic?
or that one impulse of a remark?