Healing Poetry from an Indian Physician

Today I received an email from an Indian Physician who wanted to share his poetry. I'm no judge of poetry, but I thought others might enjoy what he wrote. His name is Dr. Tauheed Ahmad. He is now pursuing post-graduate work in Community Medicine in Aligarth (North Central India). I asked him to tell me a bit about this work:

"Though I do not write 'healing poems' in a direct sense, you would be pleased to learn that I have completed a collection devoted exclusively to tobacco-control, which is a public health problem of great importance.

Apart from that my first collection (The Timeless Epitaph and other new poems) was published about 2 years back. I am sending you some of my favorite poems from that collection."

Here are a few of Dr. Tauheed's poems:

WHERE IS THE CHILDHOOD GONE

BUTTERFLY WINGS
In miniscule bits
Each a different color.

Pages of comics torn
Fly like autumn leaves
To unattended corners.

Some bedlam boils
Behind those glazed
Forbidden doors.

A glaring, blaring box
Laughing of mutual abuses
Expletives, one too many!

Where is the childhood gone?


THE PLACE WHERE YOU DWELT

IN THE tranquil ambiance
Some miles away
I see your recall
In the air and walls
On acacias, eucalypti
And gulmohars.

The house where you dwelt
Holds for me, a somewhat
Holy import.

Traveling with a historical breeze
I hear the tiny giggles
I hear taps of small feet
I hear someone chasing
Someone singing,
I hear someone
With a thud fall.

The emerging tear chimes
In little clear eyes
And I feel my heartbeats!

CAN WE BUILD NESTS

BEDS OF fine-straw matted
Lay neatly stacked
In our abandoned attic-
Some half-built nests
Perhaps never habited.

Will the birds
Come back again
If we built them nests
With quality straws
From new-found-lands.
Arranging them smooth
Folding them cozy…

…But the finesse,
And the craft…

Yes! men can make cages of bays;
But nests, they cannot!

THE EIGHTH SPACE IS SEVERED

ANOTHER STAR hovers today
Invitations are being delivered
To far lying calamities
The eighth space is severed

Facelessness travels on gleaming rays
A day of its own craving
Torn saints are running for covers today
Age  when none is revered.

Clouds seem landing on earth aloud
Soil crumbles-a hazy dust
Mountains have covered the whole sky
No prayers are being heard.



I KNOW THESE SIGNS

I READ out your verses
To my mind.

Of different meters
Different rhymes
Of different weathers
Different climes.

Of different races
Different clans.
Of holy and
Unholy plans.

Of different deities
Follower bands
Of blessed and
Bloodthirsty hands.

I cannot fathom the ages
That have passed, but
I sure know the symbols!
I sure know these signs!

WHEN MAROW EVAPORATES

WHEN MARROW evaporates
It showers me
A fountain of non-fiction

The grave never leaves
Me alone to sulk-
A company of millennia.

Every few decades
Earth sends me representations
Of contemporariness

Fumes from the bones
Unwind to me
A life of truth withheld.

Centuries of silence
Grave-diggers don’t strike
Void of a newspaper holiday.

ALEXANDER TOLD ME

‘BENEATH MY armored existence
Swarm indifferent pains,’
Alexander told me.

‘When I gave them good thought
They drank me in bouts
I drowned in their bellies.’

‘Now I have learnt to hold
Water from these creeps
And behold their desiccation.’

‘Weird shapes, lifeless, mounted
Along with variegated scars
Adorn a niche of my mind.’

When I see his vacant gaze infixed
And a tinge of sardonic smile
I know where his attention lies.

A ROOM BACK HOME

A ROOM back home
Smells tenderly of books,
Work-books, yellow pages
With black milestones-
Scribblings getting more mature
Blossoming on wings of time.

Flood of evocations
Of faint, odorless days
Touch us- we are overcome.

For mother it’s but
A biographical kaleidoscope-
Visible memories that
Speak, smell and feel.

Lost we in future, ages away
On the same wings of time-
Call it kind, call it unkind!

Back home in a confused desertion
Drowned in that fluid ambience
She sees-
Our evolution, our wants;
Her youth, her energy.

A SILENT SCREAM

SOME MICRO-biochemicals
Advancing at their  playtime
Leave their niche
Roll around jovially
In my bloodstream.

Triggering bedlam
At every turn
Something burns
Where? Everywhere!
A silent scream.

AMBUBAG

IN THE hospital nursery
Sagging spirits are
Held up by the luminosity
Which invades the minds
Forming a dynamic coat
Burying the gloom.

Sobs of the suffocations
Are heard as vibrations-
Silent, forceful!

A new life looks at the hourglass.

He folds the white sleeves,
Readying to inflate the ambubag
As his own-self gasps
For breaths and much more.

What is life?
Death plus interest!
Tears for water
Sighs for breaths
A vacuum for heartbeats
A grave for bounties all!
He loses grip over the bag.

Through transparent walls he sees,
Hope holds some desperate faces,
Seeking eyes, mumbling lips.

Vigorous hands are at work again
Another life is saved
Another death is postponed
Who’ll pay the interest?

GOD ACCOMPLISHED

TWO PITS for eyes
A wedge stands out-
It’s the nose.
Upcurl of the lip
Seems somewhat complete.

The sculptor standing
On the bamboo scaffolding
Waves below and
There is uproar.

A tribe has finally
Accomplished it god!

And this day shall they have
A feast by the river
Under auspicious shadows
Of drums, flames, cymbals.



SOMEONE IS TALKING TO ME

ALONE IN my isolation
Trees, birds, caterpillars
Chameleons, squirrels, books
Form the ambience, the company
They have got used to
My static silences and
My abrupt roars.

I do have friends
Some here, close
Some distant , but close.

These friends from far-off places
Send me sweetmeats wrapped
In glistening sheets.

As I undo the aluminum foils,
The crackles break the silence.

It seems someone
Is talking to me.

WHEN I CALL YOU LIFE

YOU DIDN’T seem much impressed
When I called you ‘life’.
You brushed it aside
Threw my words on cushion
As another expression
Of romanticism-masculine extravagance.

Heart-beats and breaths
Is that all that is life?

Sans you a captive
Of breaths and heart-beats I am.
They themselves lay encaged.

With you and without you
I figure myself.

Most blessed on earth I feel once
Beyond cravings of crown
And then as the one most deprived
Rotten beggars seem enhanced.

Do I need say
How fulfilled I feel
When I call you ‘life’

MY WRINKLES

THEY TALK of ultraviolet rays
Oxidant stress and its ageing effects.

I am shown my wrinkles in light
Some prominent, some just a trace.

Inevitable hieroglyphics of time
See how they read, none out of place.

What use making ornamental mirrors
When one cannot change the face.

I express my wrinkles, magnify them
See in all clarity, my bygone days.

Through the glass of citrus tea even
Resembling a resinous exudate,
Placed on the high table
I see my past preserved in its form
Just as an insect trapped.

MY SORROWS ARE NOT CONTAGIOUS

VOULMES OF blood
In my veins flow
Draw them out
They can make
Some faces glow.

My heart is lost
In quest of life
You can take it still
It beats within me
Blows after blow.

Have no second thoughts
Have no little doubts
As for my sorrows
They aren’t contagious-
Not the least.
I have seen it,
I am sure!

DEWDROPS GOES TO SCHOOL

DEEP INSIDE the overlapping
Folds of the half-budded rose
I stopped to have a conscious look
At a colossal dew drop.
Relaxed cuddled, enlapped.
Expressing nothing but-
A nascent innocence-
Stealing corners of my mind.

Feigning fever to stay back home
And  have a long parley with
This baby of the rose,
I drenched myself  in seas of sweat
Under the heat of  a smelly quilt.

Sun was staring at the cawing crow
When it was safe for me to rise.

And lo! The dewdrop is no more
Where must it have it possibly gone?
Do they pack it too, a heavy bag;
Send it to some far-off school…
But how can its purity survive
In an artificial whirlpool.