There sits a little Buddha in my shelf
He talks to me about glowing trees of light
He sits there asking me to close my eyes
He sits there trying to get my attention for a long time...
He peeped at me like the child of a cloud
He smiled at me a happy ray of a smile
I could fly tonight
Buddha peeped at me again
in the sheer beauty of life…
And then again
I felt the Buddha
speak to me through the pollen happy
stem of the Gulmohar flower
behind an office wall
He thanked me from the eyes of a new friend
whose desk they adorned because of me...
Sometimes I think he is looking at me
from the coffee
He listens to me and replies in the memory
of an innocent romance of a writer
How do you explain to a bus full of people
that a ray of sunshine through concrete buildings
makes the writer smile
for a moment there...
he feels like the Buddha.
That little Buddha writes himself
in the innocent poetry of a lover
I meet that little one
on a computer very often..
He laughs very loudly
in a child’s ambition singing with the flute...
laughs ever so loudly in his faith
that lives within the faraway notes
of fame in a possible future.
There he sits in the beautiful pattern
on the frosted glass on my window…
He comes to me like an invisible smoke
and takes shape…
Slowly forming himself
into a funny idea.
There he was talking again
on the side of the road
Standing between a housemaid
and a security guard’s innocent flirtation.
that little Buddha
born from the wombs of a million suns…
That little Buddha
infinitely more immense
than the million suns and earths…
That little Buddha finds
his place in the smallest cubical of a cat’s heart…
And then he paints himself in my mother’s eyes.
I have memories of having seen him sometime before
One hazy evening in the shadow of a sunset in pitch black murky water…
And he was still beautiful!! …still beautiful.
I think that now when I can see you
May be one day I will understand you…
May be my limited vision will widen itself to accommodate you
And make a home in the center of my soul
It is in my darkest moments that you speak to me in the clearest of voices
You speak to me like a child in my own voice…
You speak to me in my sense of wonder at my own body…
I see it shining like a crystal…
The crystal that you took such pains to Cut finely and polish with care.
In the middle of the smallest moment in a white flash of blinding light
I have seen you smiling mysteriously in your comfortable nakedness…
And I have seen this morning a stark naked madman walking unabashedly…
Why was everyone else uncomfortable except for him?
You have your ways of increasing my questions O little Buddha
Sometimes when I fall in love…if only for a while
In the most transitory of times and the most impermanent of arrangements
I find you smiling in a unique moment of infatuation…
for a man as sweet as young white flowers
You sing the sweetest sounds in the slowest of songs
You sing through the threads of the violin professional
And you sing through the first screechy sounds of the learning child
You sing in unison with the voices of a thousand monks.
And then you sing in the drops falling on the virgin shy earth
Your music flows through my veins and collects in the pool of my heart
And then you touch the bamboo stem and sing through the flute
And then you play the violin again…
ah you play it again…in the midst of heaven.
They must be making pianos from the wood cut from your heart
They must be playing your eyelashes that are the black keys on them
They are meddling with our hearts through your Pianos
They are making inroads into our souls through your pianos
I am writing you through electronic keyboards
I am remembering you through an electronic product
I am looking at you on an electronic screen
I am discovering you in my personal blue coffee cup
You have begun to exist not only in the music
but also in the hiss on the tape
How could you be everywhere at the same time?
How did I miss seeing you all this time?
How?
You scream through a million bagpipes
and mountains soar in my mind…
And then I meet the lonely shepherd chasing his flock
You show yourself in the valley on the edge of which I stand
You stand behind the horizon and you dwarf it
You flow through a solid stone…
You freeze yourself and turn to ice and
You make a stone falls apart and it melts.
It melts under your cold gaze…
You dance in a circle amongst the oldest tribe of my kind
You dance in the first dance of all
You have held all our hands at one time or another
You have danced before and beyond time
If you ever come down to explain to us our existence
I want to be the first one in line for the invitation
You cannot forget me.
You cannot disown me.
I have seen you.
