Sigh for a signature

You are a frequent migraine.
I’m a dull head.
You suck my life. I sigh

and wait, for a time,
like a cold mountain waits
to shoot up sprouts in the spring.

Unveiled is your visage now
and my home is on fire.
I don’t have a right to put it out?

- Haris Adhikari

(featured in the poetry forum 03.31.12)

editor's note: A dotted line, empty; a look to dry the wettest ink. Find another underwriter. - mh

Bleating shepherds

Beside a flooded river
some shepherds are bleating back
for their sheep are out of control.

It’s sleeting like shots aimed
and they have just only started
making a shed.

They sound like they’re mad
at their master who
is probably absent

and the madness climbs
cold mountains
here, in front of my eyes.

Poor lambs look like cotton fiber
blown up in the air. Their mothers call
for forgiveness but the shepherds –

bleating shepherds.

- Haris Adhikari

(added 03.31.12)

List of questions

A large group of kids
kidding
and following
their cattle
to the forest.

Across the vale
on the sunlit slope
a bell ringing
as low as the bells
hung on the napes
of these hungry cattle.

Down on the river
a broken, single wire bridge waiting
for the big people from the big city
for some years now

and up here on this passage
I’m a list of questions.

But who is to answer?

- Haris Adhikari

(featured in the poetry forum 01.26.12)

editor's note: Poets will ask anyway; we make our own answers. - mh

The tilt

Two people together
trying to tilt toward themselves
an umbrella – unfurled
and so
with stretched tiny holes.

Is the sleet something?

- Haris Adhikari

(featured in the poetry forum 11.29.11)

editor's note: Is it? Well, only if you feel the cold. Is everything something? If not, that would be something anyway. - mh

If she were a witch

If she were a witch, I guess you wouldn’t be living.
There was no earthquake in her screams, she was nothing
but wounds all over – red, blue, brown, purple –
bleeding on the junction – a matter of extreme curiosity for kids around
peeping from below your hips, or running after your footsteps.
Perhaps her busted head was a football!
Perhaps your boots, canes and stones were not enough, so
she was yelling at you to drag and thrash her more!

If she were a witch, I guess you wouldn’t be living.
Either she would surely escape flying on her broomstick
or just vanish with a simple click of her fingers right in the beginning
or furiously hurl you into a dark cave where
she would avenge by forcing you to eat human feces
the way you forced her, or, she would hammer your hands and legs
and teach you a lesson by pulling out your teeth
with more force and fury than you used to display your bravado.

If she were a witch, I guess you wouldn’t be living
and your children wouldn’t die of dysentery or of fever. Possession
is what you did to her, not what she did or did not.
She – just a single finger, and you – an entire village,
what a mad swarm of bees stinging a life to almost death!
Neither she spoke scary words nor called a thunder down.
What’s black magic? Why would she only leave the marks of her teeth
on your thighs or arms when she could have the whole of you?

- Haris Adhikari

(featured in the poetry forum 10.09.11)

editor's note: And since we are living, she can't be, after all. Oh, my! All this blood on our hands. - mh

Splattering of rain

Until it is late midnight
rain splatters into exhausted eardrums
and saturates the sleep,

What a headache, pal!
The noise is so exasperating – and unceasing,

One turns this way and that way –
reads for a while, but finds water dripping
from the book as well
onto his belly…
and cuddles up against the warm blanket
but the blanket is no wall in between –

- Haris Chand Adhikari

(featured in the poetry forum 08.23.11)

editor's note: ...and parentheses are no umbrella! - mh