Reading between the lines, this book reveals much about the author's journey through life.
The youthful, starry-eyed years produced the poems of sentimental, sometimes euphoric, expressions. But, as some wise person once described, "after going up fool's mountain and back down again to face reality squarely in the face", more realistic language and views emerged. Griefs, losses, disappointments had tempered the poet's eye, but the smaller things of life seems to prevail in the author's unending romance with life, wherein a birdsong at dawn or an unexpected snowstorm, becomes worthy of the sharing.
The ultimate revelation is complacent acceptance of life, though not always what it seems, with all the valleys and summits, but an exciting adventure that has been, at least to the author, well worth the trip.
The author of this collection is a self-described "pocket poet", most of the compositions first recorded on anything available from the pocket and tossed into a box collection.
Writing poetry has been more of a compulsion than a hobby, with sporadic inspirations surfacing, since age thirteen, that begged recording, and at age seventy-five, the search for the deeper meanings of life continues, as well as the passion of the poet's pen.
The author of this first collection has been published in many anthologies, including The Taj Mahal Review, an international journal devoted to arts, literature, poetry and culture, and as a member of the International Society of Poets, has received many Poet of Merit Awards.
Evening Stars Can Tell
Only evening stars can tell
What woodland creatures know so well;
The secrets of the darkest night
Are ever present in their sight.
When shadows bend to hide the truth,
The twinkling eyes of stars are proof
That nothing in the darkness deep
Holds a secret night can keep.
Times when moon is hiding face,
And clouds are stalled in heaven’s space,
The squinting eye of some dim star
Still probes the spaces where we are.
The birds that wing away on high
Against the canopy of sky,
Are guiltless creatures with no shame,
But earthlings, human, aren’t the same.
With half-blind eyes we’re constant weighed
By other mortals, judgement made;
Imperfect entities we be,
Another’s faults are clear to see,
While hoping inwardly our own
Are never by our peers be known.
Heaven’s eyes, the stars, beyond,
While holding fast each one in bond,
Has gentler measure, judging not
The imperfections flesh begot.
Just like the birds that wing on high,
We have no guilt to hide, deny,
For after all our failing’s done,
We trust all to The Perfect One.
Joy Revisited
Grief is joy revisited, joy in retrospect;
Before its loss the pleasure earned the grief’s respect.
Loss of a special someone? How joyous were the days
that merit so much grieving, recalling loved one’s ways.
Grief for a dream aborted?
Or of a romance gone soar?
The joy of the dream was in dreaming
and the dream, earning grief, had its hour.
Why, in this world, must each pleasure,
when past, ask the price paid in pain,
Reliving it later in memory,
bring grief and not joy again?.
Happiness bottled to savor,
like wine, grows sweeter with time,
Its vintage, a naive dreamer
who sampled the nectar sublime;
But once the wineglass is emptied,
with no more grapes on the vine,
pain of interminable suffering
is the ultimate price of the wine.
So be it, drink deep of the hour,
knowing well the price yet to pay;
Too soon both the loss and the pleasure
shall end in the end – like the day.
