Poem: The Summer Rains
Some days, I can’t write poetry, because I become an ostrich. My head is buried in the sands of the day’s sand clock, immersed in the darkness that pervades the trenches of my work life. I have verses in my head that I haven't typed in. But a poem like this appears, and to my surprise, my reticent friend of these days, Priya Patel, responded with her verse. So, this turns out to be another quick duet.
Another point: even ostriches have hearts. The poems bring the beginning and the end of the yearning of the poets’ hearts together when poetry seldom happens but the hearts yearn for something warm like the early summer rains.
Poem: No Poetry Days
There are two types of poems. Some are crafted, and some are spontaneous (to find that all poems are not spontaneous is paradoxical, but that is true). They flow out of nowhere and sometimes start making sense as they are composed. The poem appears when a little white cloud passes along the azure sky on a summer afternoon. The mind is soaked in the deep end of work, yet, that snippet of thought, creates hope, that on this warm summer day, may bring poetry.
There are no poetry days.
Those days are normal.
The sun and the stars don’t inspire.
The days just pass by.
Like…those days in the past I can’t remember.
And there were people before who lived their lives…
Just like those normal days.
The stars and the sun…
They were there, like any other day.
Then…there were the poetry days.
My heart bled, ached and screamed
Or it soared like the candor
covering the sky with its wings
Then, the words come …
The verses about you
Dipped in my love
Written in my blood or tears
Happy tears too… Ah-
The crazy days when I am with you
Like the early summer rain
Waking up the petrichor
Sweet, pure and warm
Just my poetry days are born
~Ashok Subramanian © 2024
Only a poet understands the heart of a poet. The heart is what the heart says. Priya, my dear friend, and poet, came alive again with a wonderful response to ‘No Poetry Day’. The yearning of the heart to pour its words in poems, after all, a poet knows.
Poem: Summer Rain
Where did the poetry days go
the memories of the early summer rain
and dancing beneath the stars
riding all night on the midnight train
and running away towards Jupiter or Mars
then waiting to run home to write anxiously
about how I fell in love in the rain
Where did those poetry days go
why can’t we live in the stars again
My heart still does bleed
and the aches have come and gone
but the poetry of you
I hear in every love song
and I am forever reminded by the
memories of an early summer rain
~ ©️ Priya 🕉
The whole charade of trying not to think about … I fight the thoughts. If I build a dam, I drown in the deluge of thoughts. I finally gave up.
Poem: I Give Up, Now and Forever
No. I will not fight this
I have built dams and walls
But they don’t stand a chance
Thoughts about flood the plains of my heart
The deluge breaking the barriers of forgetfulness
My efforts are like a badly planned city
The storm water drains are clogged
I won’t fight this -
After all the floods are from the early summer rains
I feel the warmth of their flow
Letting the water stagnate and percolate
Into the bloods that reach my heart
And flow through my being
I give up, now forever
Drowned in the floods
The early summer rain of
Thoughts about you.
~Ashok Subramanian © 2024
“Just as the smell of the earth during a Summer rain… Oh, how lovely is to love and to be loved in return.”
― Efrat Cybulkiewicz
