Saroj Padhi

Last night Love came offering her hand
Wrapped in gossamer beams,
In silent breaths of moist dreams;
As I stood baring the petals of my soul
...

RESURRECTION

As you hold out your hand to touch me
In tune with your breath that my name doth quietly spell
...

My love for you
alternates like a dark cloud
between the Sun and rain,
its fringe lightened by rays
...

How to toe the line to the redemptive sky?
How to approach thee in this damp, dark night
when bogged down by a derelict body, my sprit wavers
like a severed, torn kite lost in the blue spaces of hazy horizon
...

My search for you is endless in circuitous time-
draped in the jasmine body of youth
my enchanted spirit moves in forests of half-conscious thoughts
thro' the vale of foggy days and nights covered with flowers,
...

Let's mend our broken smiles, repair our love,
dent the bodies a little, dye and polish looks
after the barks of old wounds have been shed
from eyes of rueful trees into heart of thinning brooks;
...

Morning comes here
like a moist dream wrapped in dew
dripping drops of honey from
tips of leaves basking in sun's hue,
...

The wind knows how much elusively
you flitted away like a dark butterfly
under the cover of night from bush
into a neon-light- lit skyscraper high,
...

Let me like a shadow to the bed of soft grass alight
before I spread as wet beams into folds of the night
where in caves of dark, lone moments of loss torment you
fear and an unknown inner void keep you in constant fright;
...

DEOGARH

The sweating Sal leaves smell of your aging body
as I amble along the craggy bends of your woody path,
...

As dawn breaks in your half-open eyes
turned emerald due to lush drink of poison
from bouts of my deep ablution
during ecstatic union of souls' intimate night
...

As the morning Sun kisses the thatch eaves
of my lone cottage on the vulnerable shore
and the crow on the rain-drenched casuarina
asks me to open the long shut damp wooden door,
...

My city limps back to soft caresses of a new dawn
whose bleeding fingers paint the sleepy eastern sky
with hues of agony caused by the lashes of last rain
and birds fan the wounds, as up into the air they fly;
...

Last letter from Spring was written in tears
of Koel soaked in red oozing from our heart
as we rolled on thorns of inexplicable aches
tuning our ears to broken syllables of lost love,
...

These white herons brooding near me
want to say something
as they retract their long bills,
meditate for a while
...

My city limps back to soft caresses of a new dawn
whose bleeding fingers paint the sleepy eastern sky
with hues of agony caused by the lashes of last rain
and birds fan ancient wounds, as up into air they fly;
...

Startled by my own foot steps
I look back to find your shadow mocking
my dreams shattered into shreds
on the floor of a wounded time bleeding,
...

A few moments of flicker
an endless struggle to fight dark
before the final blinker
in the face of a hostile wind
...

Here the moon has lost idea of her own self
with hangover of ‘salapa' in night's cold vein,
with the pristine stream's eternal delight in
soaking in her ever burgeoning rustic pain-
...

What pearls do dangle from your lips!
Which stars of the evening sky
did you kiss! !
What dreams
...