descends upon us
imposing a regime
of shopping and parties
and for many
getting drunk or stoned.
My belief is,
if you’re part of a culture,
you have the right to express
your individuality;
your universal right to
freedom of choice—
not to be conscripted
by societal norms.
For society to come knocking,
boasting values and
echoing colonialism
on native lands…
is presumptuous.
I am perfectly normal.
It’s everyone else
that fails
to conform.
These moonlit seas
glint in vain.
An orb of butter,
spread across sea?
I am oblivious.
I have thoughts
too deep for tears:
irretrievable as smoke,
formless as midnight.
Submerged in rumination
like shadowy mangroves,
inundated at high tide:
gasping a low and ceaseless sigh;
roots burrowed deep in the ground;
and branches subduing moonlight.
The full moon tonight is white
as a ghost and terribly upset,
dragging the sea after it like a dark crime,
to the sharp edges of the night.
A melancholy frowns
and spurts in patches on the water
towards these mangroves
where sunset fades, chill-sparse
in and around drowned hedges.
The majesty of this night is not for me.
Somewhere in this fathomless night,
two lovers walking along the long beach,
together as two gulls gliding in the wind,
may justify the moon’s beauty.
But as for me,
like dark mangroves,
I do not hear
these crashing waters.
And I am blind
to the glinting
of these moonlit seas.
Waiting for the first rain
after a dry spell
has a suspense
like no other.
Its silence
calms the exhaustion
of hysterical trees,
shrugging off draught.
Its scent
lingers over fields
between blackberry lanes,
bearing their chests to the drizzle.
Its arrival
breathes most sweet lullabies of Gaia,
a gushing finger to her thirsty lips:
‘…hush now, sleep’.
Not
raining,flood
ing! Nor waving,
drowning! Waters flow
past the moist wooden houses. They
flow and flow without remorse cold and
indifferent, joining back to sea. Across
parks, thr ough roads,brimming the
Bris bane River. How rain do
es not know the feeling of
being drenched. Just as you siege my house like an unforgiving lover. Each pitter of rain, an arrow in my heart. And you, O mother of nature, don’t care. Like an overcast day, dark and raging. How you drown out the ice-cream van’s siren, The lullaby of joy once felt in a sunny day. But I will play a piano-lake-song, To fit the flooding perfectly.
(Arghh! Blogspot you annoy me! That you would inconsiderably not register spaces when i'm posting my Shape Poems!)
