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Best Poems From
RANI TURTON
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173.
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The Surest Way
Each month consists of a million days.
Days that spin out endless hours and thus
Earth whirls around the sun; a mad cosmic dance
Repeated because it cannot fail.
Lives flicker and fade. Again and again.
What is life then? An essence of being?
A being of essence?
Why does pain thrust out its hand
And stand in our way; why does love
Beckon and then flee? Why do people go away?
Sometimes joy, like a mirage, promises wild things:
The end of a journey, but destiny's choice inflicts wounds
That bleed and bleed until death, like a friend,
Cuts into suffering and calls an end.
Surely there's more to it than this.
One being's individual life cannot really matter;
Though tears, like acid, can burn the soul
Until it is almost not quite entirely whole.
But to make the soul soar beyond suffering;
To remain impervious to trivial emotion
To remain suspended in exaltation day after day
To ask for nothing but to give everything away
Is perhaps the only surest way.
Rani Turton
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174.
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The Syndrome of the Empty Plate
Throughout this wide world, a common foe.
The empty day, painful nights.
How many families have slept night after night
After dining face to face with an empty plate?
Children crying, helpless mothers
Waiting for destiny to become kinder
The fear, the abjection, the dream
Not to desire, not to die.
Body aching, bones that cannot move,
Tired out, cannot.
Lacklustre paths, wrong and right
Fades into indifference. Whenever differences arise
Between people from here or there,
Colours and customs, languages and arts
There is no differences between the syndrome
And the symptoms
And the fear and the pain that wait
Of the achingly empty plate.
Copyright: Rani Turton
Rani Turton
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175.
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The Teacher of All I Know
Here alone with all I profess
A faith, a belief in some systems of thought
Professors and priests, mystics and bards
All were often one I confess.
There were some unlettered men
Who knew more than the savants, then
There were bards who could sing and swear
And find their way to your heart there.
There were wild poppies dancing
Wild horses prancing
The teacher of all I know
Came for a few seasons
Then went for his own benighted reasons.
There was lifes blood and show
The poetry and pain and pageantry's stream
Whirled around in a fevered dream
Life was what it did not seem
Thus taught the teacher of all I know.
Rani Turton
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176.
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The Turning Point
The turning point in every life
Comes suddenly
Nothing to signal its presence
Sometimes even intuition falls flat.
Sometimes even intuition falls flat
On its face and life keeps striding on
Even you are left alone
To wonder, blunder, stumble all alone.
Alone with your thoughts
Alone with your pain and open wounds
Wondering how to witness another dawn.
Long did I err, long did I err
Long did I wonder what I was doing here
Nobody to witness the pain, nobody to share
My solitary thoughts burning holes in my brain.
The turning point comes then, once again.
Rani Turton
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