The flute unites ..

O! Krishna! 

Your flute unites all the beings 

Into one divine worship of music; 

But the bamboos divide, 

The bamboo becomes the palanquin 

The bamboo becomes the stretcher pall-bearing 

The bamboo becomes the pillars of wanton pandals 

The bamboo by friction burns into ashes 

But your flute unites all the beings in eternal living; 

How you chose and when 

The tender bamboo shoot 

and made it a seven tongued fire of music 

calling the souls to you 

and cajoling their egos to submission!

Bamboos divide and burn in waste; 

But a tender bamboo shoot 

picked by a cowherd lad 

unites all into one eternal religion 

of meditative celebration! 

It has been all in this waste of woods 

that some bamboos divide and burn 

and perhaps a tender shoot 

becoming a flute in thine hands 

unite all the souls 

into one religion of love. 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

Book in my heart..

O! Krishna! 

It is better I read 

Your book in my heart 

What you have written there 

Through my cries and joys 

Through my darkness and light 

In the blood of my experience. 

I somehow close that book 

And begin to believe all the books outside. 

At last what you have written in my heart 

Surfaces and stands true the tests of time. 

Scriptures outside pass through 

times, hands and moods. 

We have to do a lot of hermeneutics 

To arrive at what you said at first; 

There again we blurr and lead astray 

Our pen of decipher. 

we are too good in losing; 

we are too fragile in facing the truth; 

we believe in falsehoods 

and try to tutor the truth to follow suit; 

again, again we crash down 

to our barest minimum 

only to smuggle up afresh; 

Ignorance is our happy game; 

but it has become our sorry bane. 

Ignorance keeps us thrilled 

lurking in endless waste; 

But ignorance! that is one thing you cannot; 

somehow that gives me a kick to think of. 

You were waiting for me to give up all nonsense 

But I have come to you with all my stock of it. 

I do not know how to do my homework; 

you have to take me up in your hands. 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

Your smile, a parallax?

O! Krishna! 

Sometimes I feel 

I should have pitched my goal 

Somewhere visibly 

Rather than up there beyond 

in some unspecified reach. 

Mathematics was growing in my love; 

Physics theory was catching me once; 

Visible goals give you pep 

When reached and after; 

But this beyond is always a non-starter 

In your backyard 

But all the time bewitches you to get in 

And gives you illusions of super-reaches; 

Sort of a drug? who knows? 

Even now if I get in 

I forget all these grievings 

And bless me for the choice and perseverance. 

But, one has to see somethings tangible you know! 

Sowing in the unseen, reaping in the beyond, 

Tasting the transcendent, 

But the being's stomach is resolutely stoic. 

Either the transcendent becomes tangible 

Or the concrete becomes the abstract, 

If neither is possible, 

Then is your smile just a parallax ? 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

Mysticism of my ignorance ...

O! Krishna! 

Every day the life moves on. 

What all I did till yesterday 

Is now thrusting forward. 

Karma is having its momentum. 

But I am craving for your grace. 

For what? Is it to escape 

this accumulated force edging from inside out, 

back towards future? 

Is it to escape from what I did? 

I do not know, just like 

I did not know fully 

What I was doing when I was doing. 

I am now in ignorance when I pray 

As I was in ignorance when I was doing 

Many things; 

Ignorance is not that I was not aware 

But aware and unaware, 

Knowing a bit 

Knowing not other things; 

From ignorance to ignorance 

I creep through time, just as a reptile. 

But I do not tell you all these 

To justify or plead my case; 

This is what has been, 

What is happening 

And perhaps what may be continuing; 

I call you Krishna. 

Do I know who are you fully? 

No. Except for some stories and ideas 

Picked up while growing; 

You may perhaps laugh 

when I tell you all those things; 

But the comprehensive whole, 

conscious and caring and forgiving 

is how I think about you, 

when I call you Krishna. 

You may not be having 

any peacock feather 

any flute, any blue colour, 

Or you may be all colours 

or beyond any colour; 

But you are the all comprehensive whole 

conscious and caring and forgiving 

is all that I know. 

This knowledge I got 

through my ignorance, 

necessity of my imperfections, 

and the unknown fate hanging 

as death and beyond; 

My ignorance has taught me; 

My hopes have assured me; 

My fates have authorised 

This knowledge about you. 

Not through Vedanta I have come to know you 

But through my own ignorance 

and hope and fate. 

Myths may change 

beliefs may go 

But the mysticism of my ignorance, 

Hope and fate can never falsify me. 

This mysticism - is the offshoot of the same earth 

which has given birth to me,

an ignorant being of earth. 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

A problem ..

O! Krishna! 

I have a problem with people 

Who say that silence is better than the word. 

If somebody says that 

I hear animals, plants and stones and stellar dust 

Having a hearty laugh at them. 

Silence is silence, that too 

If thinking is running through it all. 

Unthinking, mute and clipped-mind frozen - 

I don't see anything great in that. 

Just a regression sad, self-chosen. 

Consciousness made word is the first incarnation; 

Unincarnated transcendence, what is it to whom? 

Even transcendence presumes 

Something available and tangible to transcend. 

But you may say: word fails the thought. 

To succeed is the chase 

And failing is happy when the chase is not closed. 

And the great secret is : 

All transcendence, super-natural and cosmic beyond - 

All things are just habitations of meanings 

Structured in the word, of the word and by the word. 

So give me a word! 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

Space or the object?

O! Krishna!

Am I the space which contains? 

Or the object contained in? 

Am I a bundle of matter? 

Or the spiritual principle which inhabits? 

Am I the log running from the birth? 

Or anything prior, running through 

The event of life and surviving 

To revert back to the original? 

An old question asked of death, 

Asked of you and many more sages. 

Every time every one of you 

Did the same ceremony of an answer 

Leaving the mystery, fifty fifty both ways. 

You may be the cosmos and transcending that 

The super and the ultimate. 

But I am just this local, this domestic person 

In this moment, in  this place. 

Why do you blush, 

Why do you rush hiding 

When the finite tries to meet you, 

The Infinite, face to face? 

If it is a contradiction that can never happen 

Then what are you to me? 

Just an hypothesis? 

A happy dream? 

Or an idle thought? 

Or just a run of the comics wild? 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

Obedient? Me? ..

O! Krishna! 

May be I am irritating you; 

Or may be not. 

I am not disobedient; 

But again I am not obedient also. 

May be I should have faith. 

But when I think of faith, 

I grow more intellectual. 

And when I go deep in intellectual, 

I pull back myself into faith. 

I will not say, 'neither here nor there' 

But 'also here and also there'. 

When I float in water I see the land; 

When I walk in the land, I see rivers and seas. 

Which is right? Fluid-vision or terra-view? 

May be you want to give me up. 

But then how will you be omnipresent 

Or even omnipotent then? 

You are all-knowing. 

How then can you say 

You do not know the agonies of the ignorant, 

That is me.? 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

The dust ...

O! Krishna! 

Once upon a time 

I thought I was a hurricane. 

Sweeping the face of earth, 

Swapping things about, 

I felt so proud, so powerful! 

But when the wind was gone, 

I came to see that I was but the dust, 

Shed down, settling on chance things. 

Just a dust .. that was me. 

But you received me into your hand 

And by your own fingers 

Placed me on your cheeks; 

In what ethereal colours I began to shine ! 

Me, the dust, on thine cheeks! 

When Radha kissed you on the other cheek, 

In the blush, on my side of Thine cheek 

I reached eternal life! 

Me, the falling dust, 

Fondly placed by Thee, 

On Thy cheek. 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

A bird..

O! Krishna! 

I was a bird puffing up 

With ego's wings 

Spatting loud my niche; 

But chasing and being chased 

I thought I was the bird of freedom. 

But when Time blew my wings 

I fell down forlorn 

On a bush I hoped. 

But your feet stood there 

To make my fall a surrender; 

You took me into your hands 

And placed me on your shoulder; 

I was captive in your love; 

Then alone I understood 

What is real freedom! 

Me, a falling bird, 

wings blown by Time. 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***

O! Krishna!

O! Krishna! 

When I was just a bamboo shouting in the forest 

I was so proud and swayed in the winds; 

But the chance hole made by the bird or bee 

Became the mouth of crying winds 

And lo! all that came out of me was noise and howling. 

But the time passed and I lost all my aggrandizing ego 

And fell at your feet realising that I was just a bamboo. 

But you took me in your hands 

And made a flute out of what was remaining as me, 

A just bamboo stick fallen flat; 

But what a miracle you did! 

Not the flute, but how such a flute out of what was me !

And when you played the flute that was once me, a fallen stick, 

What cosmic melody! and what subtle worlds of meaning! 

Music sublime, how was it possible? 

What a miracle you did out of me, 

A fallen stick! 

Srirangam Mohanarangan 

***