When
Begum Akhtar sang her last song
Lata hummed her last tune
Shahid wrote his last line
Shakir inked her last noon
What signs had fallen on those
days, what omens lay unseen,
the world was ending in a million
ways from all that could have been
Types of Falling
A coin drops into the pocket.
A leaf slows to the ground.
An eagle nosedives to its prey.
The passer-by trips on the curb.
An egg is dislodged from the nest.
The graph dips for a day.
The night sinks behind the window.
Silence descends like a Mary Oliver poem.
Your hand slips down the waist.
I move towards you and call it falling.
Write a Poem Without Time
The problem begins in the title,
the damn verb (‘write’) ushers in action,
action ushers in time.
Try again.
(Meanwhile, verbs keep sneaking in.)
Perhaps only nouns, suspended
outside all hours, like: a black drongo,
an underlit swimming pool,
a jacaranda tree.
A refusal of time is a refusal
of memory. Like: a startling place,
like: that night. A button moon
stitched to the sky like a plea.
Here the black drongo will not
dive from the elbowed branch
of the small jacaranda
into the wavering light
of the pool.
It will not wet its feathers
in the brilliant school of water.
It will not reference
any past, will not hold
onto reluctant debris.
It will be weightless.
It will not script
your impossible return
in the sudden refraction
of this night of after.
Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins India
