Anubhav Tulasi

Anubhav Tulasi (b. 1960) has several collection of poems to his credit including Naazmaa and Duroon Phool. He received Munin Borkotoky Award for young writers in 1996.

The Charcoal

Stop this torture.
Let me live as I would
You would cover my blood sprinkling dust,
That would not be.
How would you ever resist
With the illusory web of fantasies.

A moment's ease, you won't stand even that.
Unfeeling as wood, I have known you well,
I know the measure of salt and water
In your heart
Yet, the sea, you swell like the globefish

You would float like a boat
Want to be the unruly wind
That makes the sails flutter
Have you ever tried thorbbing yourself ?

You are gay because you are arrogant
Proud because you are a thorn
Your boundless joy
In hurting those who seek,

You only know how to such shamelessly
Who can beat you
In congealing to be hard

Let the grief of not knowing
How to soften in sadness
Eat you, down to the core

Let the inward fire
Burn and, singe you, even when you come as charcoal
My burnt out friend
I'll offer you two-leaved love[PA]

Rain

Like the thorns
Something is there
In the rain too.

Leaning against a pillow
It wants to settle itself
And burn the dreams
Wth the wicker.

To the murmuring ghat
of an unseen river
The rain leads me.

I deck on the candle stand
The blooming drops of rain.

The rain tills me
And in its heart
The paddy seedling I plant.

Sometimes I fly kites
With the rain

We both play
The game of snapping strings. [NT]

A Magician Who First Brought Love

I smelt a flower in your river.
The erosion has begun since.

The fire began to fly the air,
The ocarina in the stream
The lac of heart begun to melt.

That day
On a curved knife
I was scaling
The live fish of life.

That was the beginning of love
I smelt a flower
With the roots
On water
The bare tree
Was floating. [NT]

Breaking the Window Panes

Who whimpers down broken panes
may be the sky somewhere is overcast
or is it a cascading of the past?

My winged eyes discern
shapes beyond the window
it is my heart perhaps
that needles me with broken panes

twigs reach out
in importunate beckoning

putting out the lamp
you are sitting cloistered
in the depth of darkness

the bastion of whimpering [PA]

Of Inundation

After long years of inundation
the river is the story, mainly,
I shed my clothes long ago
had left them somewhere in the past
Today, I'll step into the water
For, at the bend of the road
Strewn with fallen flowers
storm and flood still rage frenzied. [PA]