Keki Daruwalla poems

Keki Daruwalla(1937 - / Lahore / British India (Pakistan))

Sappho To Aphrodite

- by Keki Daruwalla 22

Long and lonely are my nights.
Come help me Goddess, end my blight;
her absence burns me, burns my sides
with love intense.

Aphrodite, hail or sleet,
I implore you to come down from Crete;
my altar smokes, awaits your feet,
with frankincense.

Your love-demented Sappho pleads:
Give me no manna and no mead.
It's love, not wine that Sappho needs
you understand.

I haven't had a word from her!
Once again make her my lover
in bed and bower her breasts should flower,
in my hands.

Her star-erasing beauty's spell,
turns me feverish, frail, unwell.
Her presence is both bliss and hell -
I tremble so.

Her absence scars my empty flank.
Goddess you don't need my verse
to tell you this. My love is frank,
I can't dissemble so.

Bring back Gongyla to my side!
May she once more become my bride!
May she, her lyre and her fire
beside me purr.

Come foam-born and Cyprus-born,
Goddess of love and the lovelorn,
my altar awaits you with fire-urn,
incense and myrrh.

Suddenly the Tree

- by Keki Daruwalla 21

The hive slept like Argus
its thousand eyes covered with bees.
The light as it fell through the neem tree
was a marine light, in which
yellow moths set sail
from one perforated shadow to another.
The hive was mystic,
a drugged mantra
with its dark syllables asleep.
As the afternoon wore on
the honey-thieves came
and smoked the bees out
and carved out a honey-laden
crescent for themselves
and left a lump of pocked wax behind.
The bees roamed the house,
too bewildered to sting the children.
At night they slept, clinging
to the tree fork, now scarred with burns.
Sparrows and squirrels, a bird
with a black crest and a red half-moon
for an eyelid bickered over
the waxed remains the next day.
Then with a drone of straining engines
the bees rose like a swarm of passions
from a dying heart, and left.

[From 'The Glass-Blower: Selected Poems']