Tansen’s ghost considers silence |

Tansen’s ghost considers silence

What is death?
A pimple
before beauty.

I said: I’ll be perfect
make melody of myself
and I made it.

coalescing
around the question:
can silent music exist?

Yes. Only mountains
can hear me and not sink
in the ocean of aeons.

When leaves drip
with my tune, a lost pilgrim
goes insane or rues having sense

tearing his hair in the forest
till talon and claw
make a dirge of him.

Only a ghost made
not of soil spark rain breath
can handle

unbearable loveliness
that a body can’t clasp
without fraying and tearing.

But, as a bard once said
the songbird is helpless
as storm-winds savage her

garden. This saavan, my horizon
swells with songlessness.
Where shall rhythm go

when the beat breaks its vow?
Where to soar in song
when the breeze may die

choking in mountains of trash
and rocks alone may echo
Tansen’s taans

in the wasteland?
Black smoke stains my tone.
My voice bakes like the soil,

pralaya dawns in me
as on the sick trees,
their misshapen mangoes.

The stream as black as a crack
mars the mirror of a plateau
the mountains slump

and the valleys screech.
The sight of envenomed earth
stirs my heart

to entice rainclouds
into drip, pitter, patter.
Yet I hold back; ghosts

can’t help the living
can’t guide the chain of impacts
away from a chasm.

I cauterise my notes
hold my non-breath.
The clouds look like death

running amuck. To tease them
is to father floods.
So I stifle my music.

My raag that spurred earth
to sing petrichor, I place
you in the grip of silence.

← Suhit Kelkar

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