Calendar Year, Soft Shadows Poem by Ananta Madhavan

A Calendar year is New for a week and disappears
When the messages dwindle, and cannot kindle
Happiness or health. Earnest resolutions
Are banished to the pit of lousy nuisance.

Marking time is not arresting time.
There are moments beyond the counts and measure
Of clocks and watches that we can treasure,
In memories of assonance and rhyme.

Seasons are instinctively known to plants,
To beasts and butterflies, even to us.
Some mornings, when I rise up before ants
Get at the sugar and the early workers' bus,

I see the slow and silent changes of sunlight
From a terrace, level with the tallest tree;
I feel the of ebbing dark of fragmented night,
The morning star turning into a fantasy.

The burnished half-moon also vanishes;
Sunlight reclaims its domain this day.
The horizon hill is a daub of misty washes,
Solar-sieved foliage softens the trodden way.


- - - - - - -
January 2017











































Marking time is not arresting time.
There are moments beyond the counts and measure
Of clocks and watches that we can treasure,
In memories of assonance and rhyme.

Seasons are instinctively known to plants,
To beasts and butterflies, even to us.
Some mornings, when I rise up before ants
Get at the sugar and the early workers' bus,

I see the slow and silent changes of sunlight
From a terrace, level with the tallest tree;
I feel the of ebbing dark of fragmented night,
The morning star turning into a fantasy.

The burnished half-moon also vanishes;
Sunlight reclaims its domain this day.
The horizon hill is a daub of misty washes,
Solar-sieved foliage softens the trodden way.


- - - - - - -
January 2017