Poem Hunter: Poems - Poets - Poetry

A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille
Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs
Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin.
But ceremony never did conceal,
Save to the silly eye, which all allows,
How much we are the woods we wander in.

Let her be some Sabrina fresh from stream,
Lucent as shallows slowed by wading sun,
Bedded on fern, the flowers' cynosure:
Then nymph and wood must nod and strive to dream
That she is airy earth, the trees, undone,
Must ape her languor natural and pure.

Ho-hum. I am for wit and wakefulness,
And love this feigning lady by Bazille.
What's lightly hid is deepest understood,
And when with social smile and formal dress
She teaches leaves to curtsey and quadrille,
I think there are most tigers in the wood.
...

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

...

He grabs himself a rare few minutes
Away from his white noise
Glass-breaking sound of wood-cutting drills
His appetising ploys
Lay out in front of him on a plate
A block of boiled concrete ham
Cemented mix of mash & a slab of butter
Between this mountain & hill of beans
Brown sauce parts the way to gutter
A timeless masterpiece

...

It is startling to see how swiftly
A man may be sliced
From chin to prick,
How easily the bones
He has felt whole
Under his chest
For a sixty, seventy years
May be snapped,
With what calm
Liver, lung and heart
Be examined, the bowels
Noted for defect, the brain
For haemorrhage,
And all these insides
That have for a lifetime
Raged and strained to understand
Be dumped back into the body,
Now stitched to perfection,
Before announcing death
As due to an obscure reason.

[From: Poems; Publisher: Nissim Ezekiel, Mumbai, 1966]
...

I keep on dying again.
Veins collapse, opening like the
Small fists of sleeping
Children.
Memory of old tombs,
Rotting flesh and worms do
Not convince me against
The challenge. The years
And cold defeat live deep in
Lines along my face.

...

I am alive, I love my life!
There is a God, unparalleled.
I know how find
'Cos I have right mind.

Let's remember what God gave you
Don't forget that he always see you
Now, look around! and just say that
I belong you and I just love you!
...

If souls should only sheen so bright
In heaven as in e'thly light,
An' nothen better wer the cease,
How comely still, in sheape an' feace,
Would many reach thik happy pleace, -
The hopevul souls that in their prime
Ha' seem'd a-took avore their time, -
The young that died in beauty.

But when woone's lim's ha' lost their strangth
A-tweilen drough a lifetime's langth,
An' over cheaks a-growen wold
The slowly-weasten years ha' roll'd
The deep'nen wrinkle's hollow vwold;
When life is ripe, then death do call
Vor less ov thought, than when do vall
On young vo'ks in their beauty.

But pinen souls, wi' heads a-hung
In heavy sorrow vor the young,
The sister ov the brother dead,
The father wi' a child a-vled,
The husband when his bride ha' laid
Her head at rest, noo mwore to turn,
Have all a-vound the time to murn
Vor youth that died in beauty.

An' yeet the church, where prayer do rise
Vrom thoughtvul souls, wi' downcast eyes,
An' village greens, a-beat half beare

...

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops

...

When a person moves through time,
They're reborn in form, but not in mind—
A new face, a brand-new start,
But the same old soul, the same old heart.

The body may change, the name may fade,
But essence and spirit remain the same.
Without the heart, the eyes can lie,
Drawn to beauty that quickly dies.


...