STONE PLAY Poem by Dileep Jhaveri

There's heaps of stones,
Ram, now come out and play!

The moon's friend, the mirror, lies shattered.
The ocean's rubble is scattered all over.
Pips lie strewn in unploughed fields.
Fallen feathers flame in the sky.
I want to hold something, to connect, to find wings,
to mingle with something, to let fly.
What starts as a tossing of pebbles
grows into a roaring torrent of sand, fire, lava.

To float a bridge across the sea,
sure, there's heaps of stones.
Ram, now come out and play!

Heaps on heaps of ashes,
there are waters, there is blood,
breaths are whirling on the potter's wheel
lumpy clay-dolls have built castles of sand.

Now there's heaps of stones.

Ram, now come out and play.