Flattering Little Surprise & A Lesson Well Learnt

I don't what compels me to do it but every once in a while I log on to google, type my own name in the search field and look for how many entries come up on the search results page under my name. I've been doing this for a couple of years now since the first time I was published I guess. Anyways, so last night was sitting late in office because the deilivery of yet another project was due and after I completed my QA and handed over the report to the developer I was aimlessly surfing the net when even without a conscious thought I searched for myself yet again through google.

Now as you are reading this you are probably wondering what's so great about this narcissitic little activity that I need to blog about it. Well it so happens that last night I was in for a very flattering surprise, after the usual search results of all my articles published in various places etc came out, there was one entry under my name on a blog posted by someone.

Now I am a firm believer in being absolutely curious about everything, so I clicked on the url which led me to a post on myspace.com. Actually the POST was a part of a story written by this blogger and he had used one of my very early poems in his story.

The page opens with my poetry, which is being read by one of the two central charaters of his story. The enderaing part is that I am credited for it in the story itself (the blog: http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=69367774&blogID=293245088&indicate=1).

Any writer will tell you how important it is for them to have been read/ seen/ published. The very act is a validation of that piece of work. Not that being published is the raison d'etre or justification of that piece of writing/ poetry to be in existence, but more like a confirmation of everything you have seen and felt while writing it.

The 'Sun Poems' is a series of poems I had written when I was all of eighteen as a part of 'Colours of India' an inter-cultural project undertaken by IIT Bombay, when I was working there.

I do not have any of those poems with me today becasue I guess I didn't value my work then. A lesson well learnt today.

The Poem used by Paul Breach is below:

A ray of light
Gently touches my face
I look up
At a vast expanse of cosmic fires
A feeling of hope pulsates through my soul
I feel now, I am whole

I Know You

I know you as the fragile fragrance
arising from my body.

I know you as the drops of rain
knocking on my window pane.

I know you as the slivers of sunbeams
squinting at me through the branches.

I breathe you
I taste you
I feel the heat of you
Yet I know not your name.

Pure Nonsense Pure Wisdom

They were not voices
Not words, nor silence.

Soft unintelligible whispers
Pure nonsense, pure wisdom

I know not within my clenched soul
what I hold.

But feeling them so close
something started within
ravaging hunger,
unquenchable thirst,
a piece of the sun
and stories untold
need to unfold.

I have lost this twilight too,
But with me still is the darkest blue night

By the fire burning its own being
shooting crimson arrows at the sky,

A little longer must wait my bed
there are many things left unsaid…