By Tino de Sa

A Procession of One

(i)

Bleak, unlovely and unrepentant
for the many unspeakable sins of her arid past,
summer returns.

Without shame she uncovers the riverbed
with its harvest of pebbles,
too dry again for the melon seeds to root.

(ii)

Like an unfaithful lover
the monsoon comes late and without any excuse
for breaking her trysts.

Like an unfaithful lover too
she weeps tears that are false
and few and thin.

But as is with people,
so also with the rains:
even the faithless grow respectable with time.

In time

the tea-dark monsoon water spills,
a farrago of leaf and mud, in rills
that run on the road’s muck-edge.

(iii)

Like a thief in the night feckless winter steals
in one window and out the other,
and before you know it

you’ve been robbed of a season.

The thievery is complete. Spring and autumn
were the jejune stuff of poetry and text-books,
as foreign to us as London Bridge 

or Timbuctoo.

In the procession of seasons
there is but one in our town:
summer –

a little damp for a couple of months and
a little less hot for another.

 Fairy Pool

Sand-filter pebbling water clear in a hill-hole
rock-bowl.

Step-stones crimped with crisped leaves.

Strung around, a dander path fern-dappled of shadows,
of moss-cool,
of skipping water.

Manali

Is it the valley wind that keens in the high pine branches,
or is it the skittish leaves as they flinch at the wind’s freezing touch?

Or is it snub-nosed Hidimba weeping among the cedars
to see her broad husband leave?

Note: Hidimba was a she-monster who fell in love with Bhim. He lived with her but a year in the Kulu-Manali valley, and abandoned her when he’d given her a son. Manali has the only Hidimba temple in the world. It is located in a forest of cedars and pines.

 New Rain

Once more the birsled slap of scaly summer stings
Their cheeks; till the southwind brings
The first damp caress of new rain.

New rain and
Quick the dragonflies strafe the blue rocks dodging
The tumescent pods of bulrushes clogging
The water-shallows; and quick the greysilver
Flashes of fish in the river.

Plovers call and
Those sweet sharp notes of birdsong feel
Like tiny pins of shiny steel
Fixing clouds like kerchiefs on to the sniffling sky.

And the breezes like bells in a copper sun.

Flapping crows etched on the gingham evening
Are sky-ogres’ eyebrows, tarblack and wanly arched in pairs.

The town subsides to a hum
While its runneled roads that go and come
Conspire like the hushed gibbering of treeshadows
In the whiteness of a cloudless moonbright night.

Tino de Sa is a civil servant, an author and a poet. He holds an MPA from Harvard and a PhD in the Built Environment, and was in the Indian Administrative Service. Twice winner of the Times of India National Short Story Competition, he has two collections of stories to his credit, and also a mystery novel for older children. Several of his poems have appeared in anthologies of the Poetry Society of India and Delhi Poetree.

You can purchase Tino de Sa’s books on Amazon.

Photo credit Leo_Visions via Unsplash.com