Happy New Year

And when that fiery ball

Gradually plunges down into the lap of earth

The cosmic rhythm does not change

The sound of life is just the same

The wind that whistles through leaves

Sings the song heard before

The needle of the clock

Marches to the old beat

Yet

The evening brings with it

A change we’ve never felt before

We have in our hearts

Thoughts in new avatars

Desires bathed in fresh hues

Promises

Wishes

Dreams

Resolutions

And if you listen intently

You will hear the sound of the rose bud unfurling its petal

One by one

In the garden of your heart

Listen ..love..share

2012 is right there..Happy new year to you!

living in the unknown

impermeable

 Impermeable is the stone

That lies on the bank of the river

Washed ashore

Tossed by waves

Or disentangled by the web of a wild creeper that held it in place

All these years

Now shrivelled up

has lost its grip

let go

it whispered in the ears of the stone

impermeable it is

yet the edge of my gaze

 peel s it

and holds it captive without touching it

under the hard crust lies a world

soft and vulnerable

changes hues with changing winds

it is a sponge

absorbs all crimson fumes from the fires that burn it

impermeable is it?

 ...ghazal

Concrete tears

And I was the only one

With a brittle bottle of molten liquid

And they had embossed

all over their bodies

Graphite graphics of a gory past

Oblivious to the whispers of snow

Sensing the silence of the valley

They heard the raging of storms in their hearts

A lost soul

Reached out an empty hand

To moisten parched lips

Saying inaudible prayers

Bits of glass that once held in its depth

Water

now frozen into diamonds

Gulmarg..25 December 2011

Winter's Tale ..at Gulmarg

Winter's Tale

Ghazala's Meanderings: The Woman at the Traffic Signal

Ghazala's Meanderings: The Woman at the Traffic Signal: THE WOMAN AT THE TRAFFIC SIGNAL Five flyovers away was the library My life raced on the wheels of my red car The steering wheel under my h...

The Woman at the Traffic Signal

THE WOMAN AT THE TRAFFIC SIGNAL

Five flyovers away was the library

My life raced on the wheels of my red car

The steering wheel under my hands

Thoughts drifted and melted  away

Like the traffic passing by

And then a missed turn

Just four flyovers

And  I thought it was five

Sometimes lazy thoughts make you miss

The signposts

They mock and laugh at your distractions

I took the side road

where the traffic signal stopped my tracks

It was then that I saw her

Salt and pepper hair

Dark skin ,a tweed shawl draped around her form

A brown bag hung like a beaver bird’s nest on a frail branch

One hand entwined around the strap to hold it in place

Another ,holding a long cylindrical pack

She was elegant

Her body language

Her winning smile

More sophisticated than the woman in chiffons

In a black Honda city

No obvious sign of dejection when the thick,oily man in the hyndai accent

Shrugged his shoulders and waved her away

So thick were his shoulders that only the movement of the crisp white collars up and down

Suggested his indifference to her presence

So thick was her presence that I kept looking at her

The smile on her countenance was wane

She came closer

I saw her eyes

Limpid pools with a lustreless twinkle

Blurred by the haze of the early morning fog

It was 9 am

Please pull down the window pane... she gestured

The foggy eyes became vividly clear as I rolled the screen down

That was the only shield that separated us.

The two sides

And a  door

Please buy these incense sticks

But I don’t really need them

My voice sounded alien to my ears as my hand reached out to the zip of my bag

They’re special

Rose and musk and chamomile

40 rs

I’ll take it for 30

The smile ,the eyes,

She was beautiful

Serenity ,her forehead revealed

Though ravages of time had left deep gullies on her face

I took two packs

The light turned green

The incense sticks lay on the seat beside me

The musty smell of books in the library

40 rs..linguistic psychology

They’re special..hmm

Brian Tomlinson..Materials Development..language teaching

Rose and musk and chamomile

The silence in the library was deafening

My ear drums were pounding

I picked up my bag

Back home,a coffee mug in my hands

I wait for my family

In the beaver bird’s nest

The feathered lives return to the cozy comfort of their homes

They will be back soon

My anchors in life

I casually touch my hair

Fragrance of lime and apple in the shampoo

Refresh my senses

They are lustrous and black

They will be salt and pepper one day

In my living room,

the incense stick makes swirling patterns in the air

 Ghazal..10.12.11 ( i saw heron my way to the library..she has left an indelible impact on my mind.the fragrance of musk and rose reminds me of her)

Dreams and reality

They say the fairy godmother made a mistake.Or was it deliberate?

 The shoe, had it fitted Cinderella perfectly,should not

 have fallen off.But it did.It eventually led to the dream quest.The

 prince searched every nook and corner to find the perfect

 fit.Was the fairy chuckling away behind the clouds?I bet she was.

Cinderella floated between realilty and dream,just as Alice did in

 wonderland.What about us?The distance between our

 dreams and reality is life.

Ghazal...10.10pm

Give me Red Slideshow

Give me Red Slideshow Slideshow: TripAdvisor™ TripWow ★ Give me Red Slideshow Slideshow ★ to Delhi. Stunning free travel slideshows on TripAdvisor

the other side

The Other Side Slideshow: Ghazala’s trip from New Delhi, National Capital Territory of Delhi, India to Kashmir was created by TripAdvisor. See another Kashmir slideshow. Create your own stunning slideshow with our free photo slideshow maker.

Let go...

Let go of what you love.If it comes back it is yours ...forever




-confucius

Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

nasir kazmi: gaey dinon ka ناصر کاظمی: گئے دنوں کا: حبیب ولی محمد

Give me Red

GIVE ME RED

Red provokes

Red instigates

Red alerts

Red promises

Red compromises

Red ravishes

Red melts and makes molten

The hard concrete wishes

That lie trapped in icy chambers of the intellect

Gory is the tale of Red

A saga of suffering is all Red

The battleground has dust all Red

My heart that bleeds for you is Red

The rose you gave me once was Red

And now lies parched between the pages of Orhan Pamukh’s novel-

My name is Red

(written in  idleness ... wanted to leave it unfinished.sometimes there’s a sense of completion in things unfinished.Anyway,the colour red is all around me.i love it.)

Ghazal..30.10.11................................   8:30 am

kahlil Gibran

“One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours? 


I will say mine 


and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.”







― Khalil Gibran

Floating Post-Office

Floating Post- Office

Yes,there is a post office

Where letters are posted

Written in blood

On wet sheets

The water in the dal lake is ruthless

it dissolves the salt in the tears

so all that’s left of expressions

is water

plain water

the crimson camouflages with the colours of the lotus

still standing upright on wide green leaves

leaves that hide muck and swamp under  their span

the post office does not stand on hard concrete grounds

concrete is easier to destroy

what can your bullets do in thick,swampy waters?

Sharpen them,make them razor sharp

Whatever

You cannot read the ink on wet paper

Impalpable is the fluidity of my thoughts

I let my heart float in the Dal Lake

-Ghazal.....18.9.11...9.00am

Agha Shahid Ali's poems

THE WALLED CITY: 7 POEMS ON DELHI
1
From tomb to tomb,
I chew the ash of prayers.
Won’t poetry happen to me?
Caught in the lanes of history,
don’t I qualify now?
I have even seen Allah in rags
extend the earth like a begging bowl.
2
The Two-Nation Theory is dead
But the old don’t forget.
In this city of refugees,
trains move like ghosts.
The old don’t forget.
My friend’s grandfather,
hoarder of regrets,
cautions: Those Muslim butchers:
Be careful, they stab you in the back.
I lost my beloved Lahore.
My friend and I are rather simple:
We never saw the continent divide.
3
The streets light up
with the smiles of beggars.
Words fail me,
for I need a harsh language.
But I’m comfortable
like an angry editor.
4
I carry the beggar-woman’s hunger
in my hand
as her eyes follow me to my poems,
follow me into the coffee house
where I’m biting into her,
eating morsels of her night.
5
The bootblack brushes my shoes:
Does my heart beat in my feet?
His knuckes carry the memory
of this city.
My shoes shine like death
as I wait at the bus stop
for Delhi’s dome of sweat
to break into a monsoon of steel
and rip my Achilles heel.
6
Believe me,
he sat here in this dirt corner
winter and summer, winter, summer.
This morning he wasn’t there
with his ancient beard
and his stretched-out hand.
The sweeper said he took him away
with the morning garbage.
7
A safe distance of smells.
The restaurant airconditioned,
I drink my beer.
Outside the beggars
laze in empty tins,
peeling the sun,
their used beer-can.
Waiter, get me another beer!

---

AT JAMA MASJID, DELHIImagine: Once there was nothing here.
Now look how minarets camouflage the sunset.
Do you hear the call to prayer?
It leaves me unwinding scrolls of legend
till I reach the first brick they brought here.
How the prayers rose, brick by brick?
Shahjahan knew the depth of stones,
how they turn smooth rubbed on a heart.
And then? Imprisoned
with no consoling ghosts,
bent with old age,
while his cirgin daughter Jahanara
dressed the cracked marble reign
his skin kept up for so long.

---

QAWWALI AT NIZAMUDDIN AULIA’S DARGAH<1
Between two saints he shares the earth,
Mohammad Shah Rangeele
(evoked in monsoon khayals).
The beggar woman kisses the marble lattice,
sobs and sobs on Khusro’ pillars.
In a corner Jahanara, garbed in the fakir’s grass,
mumbles a Sufi quatrain.
We recline on the gravestone,
or on the saint’s poem, unaware
of the sorrow of the pulverized prayer.
Time has only its vagrant finger.
Knowing no equal, it pauses for massacres.
2
Suffering has its familiar patterns:

We buy flowers for Nizammudin’s feet,
dream in the corner to the qawwal’s beat.
The saint’s song chokes in his throat.
The poor tie prayers with threads,
accutomed to their ancient wish
for the milk and honey of Paradise.
3
I’ve learnt some lessons the easy way:
I’ve seen so many, even a child somewhere,
his infant bones hidden forever.
Stone, grass, children turned old:
The dead have no ghosts.
4
These are time’s relics, its suffered epitaphs:
I come here to sing Khusro’s songs.
I burn to the end of the lit essence
as kings and beggars arise in the smoke:
That drunk debauched colourful king
dances again with hoofs of sorrow
as Nadir skins the air with swords,
horses galloping
to the rhythm
of a dying
dynasty.
The muezzin interrupts the dawn, calls
the faithful to prayer with a monster-cry:
We walk through streets calligraphed with blood.

---

THE JAMA MASJID BUTCHERUrdu, bloody at his lips
and fingertips, in this
soiled lane of Jama Masjid,
is still fine, polished
smooth by the generations.
He doesn’t smile but
accepts my money
with a rare delicacy
as he hacks the rib of History.
His courtesy grazes
my well-fed skin
(he hangs this warm January morning
on the iron hook of prayer).
We establish the bond of phrases,
dressed in the couplets of Ghalib.
His life is this moment,
a century’s careful image.

---

THE EDITOR REVISITEDYou still haven’t called me a poet, Dear Sir,
and I’ve been at it,
this business of meanings, sometimes delayed,
selling words in bottles, at times in boxes.
I began with a laugh, stirred my tea with English,
drank India down with a faint British accent,
temples, beggars, and dust
spread like marmalade on my toast:
A bitter taste: On Parliament Street
a policeman beat a child on the head.
Hermaphrodites walked by in Saffron saris,
their drums eching a drought-rhythm.
The Marxists said,
In Delhi English sounds obscene.
Return to Hindi or Bengali, eachword will burn
like hunger.
A language must measure up to one’s native dust.
Divided between two cultures, I spoke a language foreign even to my ears;
I diluted it in a glass of Scotch.

A terrible trade, my lip service to Revolution
punctuated by a whisly-god.

Now collecting a degree in English,
will I embrace my hungry country
with an armful of soliloquies?

This trade in words continues however as
Shakespeare feeds my alienation.

Please note, Dear Sir, my terrible plight
as I collect rejection slips
from your esteemed journal.

---

KASHMIR WITHOUT A POST OFFICE
. . . letters sent
To dearest him that lives alas! away.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins

1

Again I’ve returned to this country
where a minaret has been entombed.
Someone soaks the wicks of clay lamps
in mustard oil, each night climbs its steps
to read messages scratched on planets.
His fingerprints cancel blank stamps
in that archive for letters with doomed
addresses, each house buried or empty
Empty? Because so many fled, ran away,
and became refugees there, in the plains,
where they must now will a final dewfall
to turn the mountains to glass. They’ll see
us through them see us frantically bury
houses to save them from fire that, like a wall,
caves in. The soldiers light it, hone the flames,
burn our world to sudden papier-mâché

inlaid with gold, then ash. When the muezzin
died, the city was robbed of every Call.
The houses were swept about like leaves
for burning. Now every night we bury
our houses and theirs, the ones left empty.
We are faithful. On their doors we hang wreaths.
More faithful each night fire again is a wall
and we look for the dark as it caves in.

2

We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,
one unsigned card, left on the street, says. I want
to be he who pours blood. To soak your hands.
Or I’ll leave mine in the cold till the rain
is ink, and my fingers, at the edge of pain,
are seals all night to cancel the stamps.
The mad guide! The lost speak like this. They haunt
a country when it is ash. Phantom heart,

pray he’s alive. I have returned in rain
to find him, to learn why he never wrote.
I’ve brought cash, a currency of paisleys
to buy the new stamps, rare already, blank,
to buy the new stamps, rare already, blank,
no nation named on them. Without a lamp
I look for him in houses buried, empty
He may be alive, opening doors of smoke,
breathing in the dark his ash-refrain:

Everything is finished, nothing remains.
I must force silence to be a mirror
to see his voice, ask it again for directions.
Fire runs in waves. Should I cross that river?
Each post office is boarded up. Who will deliver
parchment cut in paisleys, my news to prisons?
Only silence can now trace my letters
to him. Or in a dead office the dark panes.

Connection

You are nervous

No i'm not

Yes you are

No i'm not

I know you are

How can you say that

You have no idea where you are going

That's because the lights are blinking on either side

so you're nervous

it's all because of you

forget it

and she maneuvered her way through the busy roads

the light behind her 

casting a shadow in front

she could not fathom the distance of that silence

Nostalgia engulfed her

she drove in silence

hey i'm not that bad a driver

if only the two lights were not blinking

you would have known what direction i was taking

without me having to tell you

that the birds need to rest after a flight

what do they do in a wireless world!


....ghazal

The Fish in the Sea is not Thirsty

n fact, no mind is needed to see that which 
In fact, no mind is needed to see that which 
In fact, no mind is needed to see that which is. Mind means thoughts. And if there is a traffic of thoughts, you will never be able to see what is, you will see something else. You will see what your thoughts allow you to see. Your thoughts prevent much reaching you. You will be surprised to know what modern psychological researchers have come to know: ninety-eight percent of the reality is not allowed to enter in your being; the mind only allows two percent. So whatsoever you see is only two percent of the reality. And because the mind allows only two percent of the reality in and then gives you the feeling that this is the whole, you live in a false world. You think the part is the whole. And you live accordingly – your whole life becomes a falsification...
Osho
The Fish in the Sea is not Thirsty 
Ch-2                                      

Maple

When you really want something the whole universe conspires to get it for you.Your wishes,your desires start inching towards you.This is the law of attraction.Maple leaves have always attracted me.I have them in the form of clay pendants,embroidered on bed sheets...but now i'm  actually going to  collect them and feel them with my fingers!Each and every vein in the leaf sings a melody so sweet you would want to go on listening to it for ever.One more day and i'll be a part of you..

Why I love the Rain so much...

Monsoon is the season that links you directly to the cosmic energies.How? Is there any other season that touches you, drenches you and purifies you to the core? The rain does that. However impalpable it might be, that string of shower connects the sky and your being in a way no other season does. Walk out in the rain; look up at the vaguely formed clouds. Feel the soft showers as they plaster your hair to your shoulders. You are connected with that Energy up there. The rhythm of your heart is in tandem with the rhythmic falling showers. Enjoy the moment. Let lose your inhibitions and dance to the music. Now you want to hold the vestige of that moment in your cupped hands. That’s not really possible. Nature has its own way to be one within you and without you.

Summer thaws frozen desires till we melt away the winter blues.

More Sayyann mose bole na..

http://youtu.be/7Zl7OaVwjHE

ellipses

How can there be any such thing as The End!There are no full stops in my life...only ellipses...period!

Quote of the day..

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

mitti...

Vacuum

Vacuums are alright in spaces...but not in life.

To My Papa

The lucidity of his words

Strange to my juvenile comprehension

The tone of his voice

Serenading the air around

Cascading like a cool spring

On the meadows of my imagination

I loitered about

To be near him

I looked up at the sky

 My hands outstretched

And saw bubbles floating down

In my open palms

When I had a handful of bubbles

I placed them in his lap

He placed a loving hand on my head

And continued talking to his friend

We were both there

In our own worlds

His world a world of wisdom and words

Of  books and ink and crisp sheets of papers

The sound of his pen

Sometimes loud and sometimes soft

I was in my world of bubbles and  clouds

Fairies and flowers

Monsters and demons

Jadu tha sapna tha kya tha

Maine tujhme kya dekha tha

My first rhyme

Full of colours

Oode oode neele neele peele peele pairahan

His lap,my most comfortable chair

His chants of Iqbal

Music to my ears

The month was December

I was draped in vermillion

Henna on my hands

Anklets and trinkets

The sound of shehnai 

dances and merrymaking

My nose freshly pierced

I could not control my tears

Why couldn’t they be gentle with the piercing!

Oh! Why did they have to be so harsh with the needle?

My head on his shoulders

He held me in silence

This silence is the connection

Though sometimes we break it with words

19.6.11

Funny adverts

Hey!!Just read this advertisement and can't help lolling and rofling....Rafeeq-E-Hayat is very effective and useful as first aid in all kinds of pains, sores and swellings. It gives immediate relief in indigestion, dysentery and stomach upsets. It is soothing application in insect bites, burns and headaches. Useful in early stages of cholera to check vomiting & purging and to stimulate the digestive system.










Check this out....(clicked when on an official visit to yamunanagar)

Check this out...

I saw life unfurling petal by petal....