"After A Visit To Jabal Sabar"
and Other Poems

After A Visit To Jabal Sabar*

From the charming, dizzy heights of Jabal Sabar,
Man like a tiny
End of a sucked out cigarette
Might be tossed from the top
And disappear into the mist below,
Might fall on to the tiny houses
That appear from the arresting height
Like toys and give the thoughts
Of going away.
Is it possible to go, even
After tears roll and hands dangle after
A shocking shake, words become drooping
Flowers of emotional exchange?

I look at the skyscape addressing a cloud,
That may rain any moment
And one can listen to its sweet,
Mesmerizing melody,
Delicate drops falling on the soft
Petals of a lotus flower:
Exotic fragrance floats
And settles down
In the memory and follows
Wherever one goes,

Going is like a garden that looks up
To the sky after its full bloom,
An inevitable Everest of an end--
You carry the bounty with gloom,
In your bosom:
Whenever you go,
Wherever you go,

Like thoughts
In your mind;
Like blood in
Your heart.

      *A well-known mountain in Tai'z Governorate, Republic of Yemen (Altitude: 3070 meters)

---

An Undying Quest

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

William Carlos Williams

An enigmatic joy, images give,
An emotional response that goes deep
As crystalline birds fly and achieve
Flights of imagination mingling their joy-leap
With the joy of the perceiver,
Jubilant wings spread forever.

Unlike the daily-dying news
In the sensational folds of
Newspapers suffering from pale views
Burdened with tempting temporariness of
The neglected pile in the corner
At the end of the day, gives charm no longer,

Finally sent to a grocer or a peanut-seller or sold
At a very cheap price to an unknown fellow.
Words too are lying at the second-hand shops, bold,
Lilting melodies of a Longfellow
They are leaves of grass singing
Looking forward to such a mingling.

Wrinkly, ready, marked with coloured pencils,
Beside the holes made by silver bugs
They will be accepted again, unlike used stensils,
Read and sold and reread and sold again
And again on the book-selves they are gleaming,
A bunch of flowers, blessed, smiling.

Poems create fresh worlds; delicate, diverse,
Eternal, they are
Ashes and sparks of a new universe
Erected on the debris of a shooting star
That was once shining in the sky
Now inhabited-an enduring tie.

Suddenly a bird sings,
Winter blinks at him and is rather dumb,
Perched on a leafless bough, spreads his wings
Leaving behind hope of a full blossom
Again, in search of some more,
In search of some lore:
An undying
quest.

---

Big Things Start Small

Like the rains in the afternoons here
All big things start small.

And see now it is sunshine again!
The rainbow of the hills arching over
The grassy tops against the backdrops of
Blue and white, the beautiful bow of
The green-armoured warriors,
Look at them and take a plunge in
The silent streams of nostalgia and
See time's uncountable molecules
Making myriad patterns,
Flowing silently, of pain and pleasure.
Small start they had years ago.

These patient heights of the past
Have seen big things small.
These patient depths of the past
Have seen small things big
These patient portraits of the past,
Of the present into the future proclaim
Big things start small.

And touch the tiny petals after
The rains, into the veins will flow
Fresh fount of feeling in the form
Of small corpuscles of a big rose,
Seed-cells containing astonishing greatness
Of today and tomorrow of yesterdays.

Seeds are the flesh and blood of
Autumn's bounty, thriving
On the altar of altruism.

A rainbow is a massive multihued rose
Painted with the little flecks of sunlight,
Measuring the depth of starry heights,
A fresco on the theme of change.

A rain-drop is an ocean
Of leaves on trees, moving
Upward.