From my first book of poems ' The Divine Hand In The Dark'.

Winter light

I behold once again
In this secluded wilderness
The slant of the mystic sunshine
On this cold wintry morn.
The quiet of the sky sent down in silence
Sieving through leaves
Crossing my lonely path
Painting in hazy light this dark walkway

Where the curves bend sedate
And the pale rays fall beyond
The heart half perceives what they create
And disturbs me with a strange curiosity

And all I feel is love
In thesedeep and gloomy woods
In the sound of the silence...
In the stillness of the wilderness!
Those solitudes with an aching charm
Felt along the blood and along the heart
Embeds in every cell and stings from deep within
Oh! All I feel is love..that touches the inner soul.

Let me wander on this path
Sleep on this winding walkway
The winter sun embracing the soul
And be home to my younger years!

And then after many wanderings
When the heart will subside
These woods shall still catch  the gleam
Of the past existence of a soul
Who cane here, lost in woods
In deep love
With a far deeper power
Than that just meets the eye!

And how the mind stood here
Unwearied in love
With quietness and true beauty
And a painful joy in the wind
And those beatings of the heart
Those lost forms and sounds
Of my half murmuredthoughts
Remindful of the solitary walk
Upon this dark walkway and
This pallid winter light in the woods!

 A thunderous rain fell out of the sky today morning. After a brief encounter with the rain in all its wild glory I returned to the interiors . Sometimes the rain that fall outside is not enough. You just want to sit inside the caverns of the rain and wish it lasts forever. The being itself dissipates some heat and in the warmth you snuggle with yourself and forget everything else.."Into each life some rain must fall. ..into each life some rain must fall.".....I flipped the internet like a poetry book to search a famous rain verse that suddenly came to the mind.

The random searches lead to some Haikus by Matsuo Basho. My daughter was the one who first gave me a lesson on Haikus...the 5-7-5 magic. She hasn’t written one till date,  but she got to experiment a few as part of her curriculum assignments which I never got to see. But that left me a new world in poetry... reading a few ones, I couldn’t help marvel at the simplicity of the haikus. ..The  way they are so deeply connected to the real sound, feel and picture of nature ..the way they significantly highlight the moment’s splendour .... it’s not an easy game though to capture the moment’s glory in defined syllables...(I tried one desperately unable to bear the beauty of the cherry blooms , the first time...)

 But haikus were made perhaps for such moments....as they say, so that the beautiful and small things around in nature do not go unnoticed...to feel, without missing an ounce of the nature's  divinity....

 It's raining outside. And I like to think this....

"An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,
splash! Silence again."

Matsuo Basho

Like rain it sounded till it curved

Emily dickinson ...her verses are unusual, they carry the wind of immortality, death and a strange  mystery surrounding those. Yet, of the rainy wind when she described, it carried the mind to a plane even beyond...

The imagery is filling, the lines sketching deep and different levels of meaning, spiritual, inspirational even. Each time I read- I like to read it aloud- I can hear the wind curve, the rain and the wind filling the wells with a warbling note...a poem is not just its creators world, it  pulls out the readers world too, different ones...

Reading loud the lines, just for the superficial bliss of a rain and wind!

Like rain it sounded till it curved 

and then I knew 'twas the wind

It walked as wet as any wave

but swept as dry as sand..

when it had pushed itself away

To some remotest plain

A coming as of hosts was heard

It filled the wells, it pleased the pools

it warbled in the road 

it pulled the spigot from the hills

and let the floods abroad

it loosened acres lifted seas

the sites of centres stirred

then like Elijah rode away

Upon a wheel of cloud.

If dreams were coloured white

They fell like flowers behind the backyard......for my eyes were novice to think of it as snow...... A moment hence a new tale exploded in the heart..  ...another universe created in the eyes.....

The snow descended slowly like a mystic dream.... yielding to the tugging wind, filling the crevices, holes, roofs...settling on the trees, gleaming on the tin sheet, lazing over the fence.

The next morning the entire estate looks like a beautiful Christmas cake frosted ..the mellow sunlight appears with a warm soft glow  and stretches out in thin strips on the snow and the unfrosted patches of yellow brown grass that were spared .

Upon the untamed hill slope, snow scatters in peculiar curves..appearing like a rivulet that has lost its way in the wilderness..the unseen gurgling brooke beyond the fence has quietened. ....Perhaps frozen into a patch of ice ..

The street lay clad in a single hue ..white..the vision growing ethereal ..and hazy..like last night's dream.

A silent light glistens on the fallen snow..it spotted and speckled the trees, my heart and the black lone bird at the edge of the tree .The light, the snow and the distant houses bathed in a faint light sent an unbelievable warmth to the heart...The eyes closed for an instant in a long distant dream...hours passed by.

...the faint sunlight warmed the eyelids....and it opened to see the light flushing the white away....

Two tiny birds rolled in a straight strip of sunlight and flitted onto the fence relieved of ice..the suns arms grew longer and longer the green grass struggling out of the ice in a soft shade...the greens tinged with the light from the white...like the artist had decided the green for the grass shall have an extra dash of white mixed in instead of a lemon hue..

I saw a rainbow sprouting from the usual corner ..its usual station behind the hills, resting in a faint glory above the cakey homes now  clad in snow ..the ice melted down the hills ... water murmurs somewhere...possibly the brooke has resumed..............

Desert Rain

It is an unusual weather. But rain in Dubai is beautiful. The mind glides into a deep journey of thoughtful contemplation and tranquillity. It is a delightful world. Like many others, I have stepped out into my balcony wielding the video camera to capture a few moments of the glory. These are one of the rarest and the most ecstatic moments in the cloudless, arid regions of the world. I am as exuberant as my little child when I look out. As for her, she is witnessing the first rains of her lifetime after she has started getting the smell of the world around her. She was born in the mid summer of our native land where the clouds simply open up and pour down in the monsoon. Ironically, she had missed the delightful sight, for we had moved out in search of greener pastures abroad, to these rainless regions of Arabia, a week before the onset of the first beautiful monsoon of her life. But perhaps she is lucky, for these showers are the first of its kind in years in Dubai.

The rains have always been fascinating. Back home, in God's own country,the aesthetic mind gets to relish much more of the beauty of the rain.The pitter patter , the muddy puddles, the veritable vegetation and floral bounties standing washed as if painted in the brightest hue, all excites the heart.  Peering out of the window on a sunless day  the murky skies lend a balmy delight to the eye.  . The rain clouds seem to be the pouting little child ready to burst into tears. The thunders and lightenings may be the taunting elders. Soon the rain would pour down and the little brats of the neighbourhood  run out in joy splashing in the little puddles . The dreamy adolescent stands in a trance gazing on for hours at the nature around standing washed in rain  . Night rains are  passionate. The tiny silver drops of water on the blades of grasses shimmering in the street light adorns them like the christmas tree and fills the heart with an inexplicable sensation. All is dark and still outside and the mind dances to the rhythm of the rain .With a pen and paper, like the blind in the dark, the poet gropes for words to get rid of the ache in the heart but to no avail.  The  wearied man amidst the din of the city ,  sits back and listens to the music of the rain that soaks in as a soothing balm to his strained nerves. Long drives in monsoon are charming. The car  streams on. Water forms  weird designs on the windshield. . Looking out, the vision gets distorted in the heavy rain. The trees, the buildings and the signboards  appear like the half done painting on the artist's canvas.

In arid deserts , where the sunbeams burn like fires and the earth sweeps in the whirling dust, the light showers cool the eyes and soothe the being.  People are madly rushing out grateful for the little drizzles the heavens have showered on this parched land. The red hot ground that throws needles right into the eyes now stands damp, the fiery fury vanishing in the ecstasy of a beautiful shower. Water is dripping from some dusty windows drawing strange designs.  Someone drives amidst the rain with the windows rolled down. The scent of the air is refreshing. No umbrellas are visible. All stand emotionally involved with the nature round. Emotional myself, I put my little one's hands outside. Her starry eyes twinkle at the first drop of the desert rain on her palm...

I saw the wind, the invisible wind

Dancing wild in this country town

Howling, whistling, piercing the night

with its haunting lamentation!

I saw the wind, the wild screaming wind

Pounding on earth with all its might,

Bending and tossing the willows with its arms

Tearing down trees and the last leaves

I saw the wind , the cold November wind

whirling the freezing windmills

Twirling the tall clouds and sending them

Fleeing down the dark green vales

I saw the wind, the beautiful catastrophic wind

Raining stories of love and war

Enduring paradoxes, consoling, alarming

Emptying and filling!

Your canvas of grey and green inspired... In the quietness of a rainy solitude.....I painted these lines like a child....

On placid dawns such as this...
I still dwell 
on the realms of another dream....
For my night was sleepless 
in thoughts of rain!!! 

Pale & pallid through the window way
even as the slant of sunlight crosses my way
With quiet steps tentative &  warm 
My eyes are still dreamy today
In thoughts of rain that lashed yesterday 


Through the dark nights the heart flies
till the break of the next rainy dawn
Slow inclinations to fall back again
to the pallid charms of a dark rainy morn....