Ganga Poem by Murali Sivaramakrishnan

</GANGA

1
Ganga,
frivolous, as yet the girl
you flirt with countless millions everyday;
silver trinklets tinkling over the smooth round stones,
whispering ecstatic love songs;

but waken anew into the awareness of aeons
as softly the evening sky buries his flushed face
in your cloudy tresses;

with a singular valediction you move on.

Far in the tamarind boughs
crows assemble. Their cawings add another leaf
to the chronicle of your loneliness.

2
The wheat fields turn yellow, then brown.
Sometimes a lone night bird cries on the wing.
The moon throws silver behind the mountains.
Fragrance flows downwind.

Ganga,
Flow to me.
Fondle me with your thousand little fingertips,
nibble me with your thousand little silver lips,
curl around me, sweep me into your lap.

Ganga,
Ganga, my love,
how you tremble, marble-cold.
Hold me closer to you.
Snake-like I slip and slither
on the soft swell of your breasts
on the languid slip of your thighs,
only to deliver myself on to the misty grounds
of your remoteness.
Each intake of my breath
tears us farther and farther apart
drifting into the vast regions of the formless
till you are all but lost to me.
Ganga, I can hardly feel you.

Like death you remain unseen, yet too near.
But sever not these chains of sensation
that still bind us together;

my heart needs them all.

3
I dearly love the wind in the trees.
It reminds me of your floating hair
which streams like a burning banner of love in the moon.
Tonight the wind storms into my room,
wild, hectic, unappeased.
I look on helpless and disarmed.
It bloats out my letters as they are formed
and breathes into my lines and swells them.
High in the mountains they are caught
in the lofty trees, your tresses and my love.
Ganga,
my deliverance,
what it had take for me to build in devotion
I have ravaged in violent emotion.

4
Night feels its way into me. Gently
unfolding me layer after layer.
Like the desolate cry of the lone lapwing
my mind soars in empty space.
A mute yellow landscape spreads its nonchalance
below me. The stench of burning sand invades me.
And souls devoid of gravity and reality fly up to me.
What each has gained in faith
the other has lost in despair.
Staring vacant eyes bespeak of a bland fortitude
conceived in helplessness.

Somewhere in the reaches of my corroding memory
I hear you lapping; or are you chanting
the vedic hymns garbed in the saffron folds of a sannyasin?

The dead have found salvation in you.
The living with garlands adorn you.
Prayers dissolve in you, to vanish in dark circles.
Then I find you—
a silver trickle in the bosom of Himavant.
Perhaps this is the place where you descended
with the might of a million Akshouhinis
to be caught in the tousled locks of a Savage God.


5
The mountains know the hand of God.
They are so mute, so huge, invincible.
I have lost my bearings confronted with such vastness.
One moment I am the Brahmin pundit
performing the funeral rites,
absolving the sins of the past;
another moment I am the corpse, soul-flown, half-cremated ,
tossing amidst your immortal caresses,
in a crystal present; a pariah kite dips
and takes off, and I with him fishing
for still-smoking remnants
on your sun-stretched shore-lines;
the I am the derelict seeking the hermitage
lined with sensual feathers; a breath, a pale whisper,
a flutter of wings, and as a dove I descend
into your silvery depths.

6
As when the mist lifts its veil for a moment,
and blue mountain glimmers into view
for a moment only, to eclipse into eternal quiet,
regions of the soul hitherto unvisited
heights I never knew existed
manifest through my naked self.
People, places, things and sensations
harmonize in a new rhapsody of timelessness.

7
Dark nomadic patterns of grim silence
mingled with the subdued crying of a child;
flash of a low-flying bird in the night sky
across the flares of a few dying stars;
the eternal wakefulness of tiny relentless waves,
and the footfalls of everyday death.
Often, now, I would weave on the same relief
gospels of assurances, surmises, and faith
in a prolegomena to sleep.

8
Ganga,
Ganga, O Ganga,
let me, love, with an ear to my heart,
withdraw in selfless meditation
into the deeps of my mindscape,
and find you, flowing gently
over the smooth stones of my unknowing,
unpossessed, eternal, unceasing.

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