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Extracts from The Blue Notebook by Randhir Khare, award winning Indian poet, writer, playwright and activist
This is an unpublished sequence of poems that expresses the powerfully organic life-view of one of the most accomplished poets on the Indian subcontinent. It is accompanied by a drawing from Earth Lines, his new series.
What Lies Between
Between the new leaf and the old wind something has passed, tasting of April’s end and the copper breath of the sun, snow dissolving in streams trickling into green pools in the womb of the forest, ice cracking into shards like words of a poem that no one wants to read, swallows autographing the blue and the mud wounds in rocks erupting into flower scabs.
Between the fall of a feather and the rise of the new moon something has passed, echoing with the cry of monkeys from treetops, trembling with the murmur of sleeping bees, moving from mud to moss to bark, climbing pale light streams through the hearts of pine resin.
Between the alphabets of the changing seasons lie purple moments of stillness drunken with longing.
Infinite
Swollen blue in a dream shell, I float in the yolk, heavy with waiting. Lazarus, balm-smeared and silent; within, history mutates, rejects, resolves, blends, becomes, bears messiahs from its womb, scatters the Word like seeds; and the carpenter, hands smelling of wood-shavings, hammer rust and wine, waits outside, a miracle in his fist. Waiting. Between living and dying, between waking and sleeping, between speaking and keeping silent, between light and dark, between the Hour of Remembrance and the Hour of Forgetfulness, between being and becoming, between the slaughtered lamb and the flight from the Pharaoh. I am waiting, floating in yolk, for the moment of the cracked shell, hanging upside down, Odin, head-blood pounding, staring down at the alphabet of runes.
Light, clear light, light of awakening, light of the resurrection, light of infinite possibilities, make me a poem.
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Drawing by Randhir Khare from his new series Earth Lines
which is part of his 7th solo exhibition opening later this year.
© Randhir Khare