Jagannath rao Adukuri

We looked for her in a revived memory
In the greenness of the memorial forest.
A young mango tree flourishes for her
In the vast dome of the academy’s sky.
...

When your eyes go astray and balled
No thumping on the chest revives music
Distant listening and hair in a close mat
An electric shock here, needle piercing there
...

The night's wakefulness came across the starlit sky
Over the dark cluster of mangoes and the court wall
With loud cymbals and scraps of movie songs
After lanterns started flickering with halos of moths.
...

A nerd bitten by the charity bug,
Spoke of slum children’s education
And shining darkness in their eyes.
In the shanties, the water flows
...

This season our backyard coconuts
Hid it under their swinging fronds
Behind our asbestos-sheeted shack,
Its presence marked by the pale shadow
...

Right now, in the room next, she seems to say something
At times as I lift my eyelids she appears in vision's periphery
As an incandescent presence in the diaphanous daylight.
At midnight I see a tiny lip movement as the train hoots
...

On the river bed three holy rivers meet
Two of them are in the minds of people
The third is a streak of undammed water
The holy men and shop people celebrate
...

My figures are shadowy, squatting
On the river bank with halos intact.
They lost their identity, however
In the prevailing spatial situation.
...

My spectacles are on the corner table;
There lay fine muslins and stitched textiles
Woven with delicate patterns, their craftsmen
Lived in mud-houses and their eyes failed
...

On the mother’s knee, you got slapped
With alternate palms, warm with coal-fire.
Then the cradle went up by the mother's hand
You closed eyes to the world beyond cloth
...

It was in dreams he broke vows of silence
And flew, full of love, into the blue sky
Like a colored balloon with a hanging fate.
In his dreams words quickly became things
...

We tried hard not to dream
While awake and in sleep
We leaned against the parapet
The shadows seemed to tease;
...

Thinking is so much chemical.
The nasty smell of death
Is in boat, earth-pot and river
It is all a game, my being
...

An intrepid dreamer brings
Several images in continuation
The flying water and the hills
Later the peach blossom
...

The body struggles
Within the maze of words
No meaning comes forth
Only some guttural sounds.
...

While I was having my head shaved in her smoke
I asked why the hearse should have blown the siren
As we had gone about throwing flat rice on her silence;
...

But better speak about sorrows
Of the flesh and the evil man
That existed in the bird’s nest
Of one’s cerebrum, littered
...

the fat priest who had led her spirit over fire
ate blobs of sweetened jaggery-rice balls
as the sun burnt your back and the hairless head
First, amid loved rain and river sand
...

river noise and river silence
swept by leaning trees and rocks
carry ashes of our living since dead
Our rice balls are carried in rapid waters
...

Now you are not the same as day things.
As though you are one among all those
Who form the viscous mass of night.
When you walk alone under the stars
...