Astika
Royal
Mason
Publishing
The Poetry of
Abhinabha Tangerman
Autumn
O season of ripe beauty, you I greet!
Whose heart is love’s calm wisdom at its throbbing core,
Your deep hues and myriad colors make the soul’s wings beat,
And lift a lover like me to your ambrosial shore.
Through you Nature weeps its precious golden tears,
In you a mortal eye could glimpse its native Immortality,
O endless fount of inspiration to the poet-seers
To be bound by your embrace is to be truly free!
A glad earth bathes in Your benign and lustrous smile,
Man’s heart thrills with unknown rapture and delight
By your whispers and footfalls and flute-call beguiled,
An ancient kinship links him to your celestial height.
A brimming of golden sweetness in Your dreaming eyes
Fills the world with the beauty of a realm divine,
The sun’s last rays serenely trickle from Your purple skies:
I send my love and song and call Your blessings mine.
Icarus
I donned a pair of wings my father made,
And then took flight towards a distant sun.
I visualized my solitary run
Unconscious of what jealous gods forbade.
My bold ascent their calm repose disturbed,
As they conspired with increasing wrath
To engrave upon my dream their epitaph,
Lest my ambition their proud high seats usurped.
From a god’s perspective man is but a worm,
A lowborn creature writhing in the dust,
Pitiful and helpless and forlorn.
Yet one day worms will build a hardened crust,
To grow wings that will weather any storm —
See me fly upon the wind-swept gust!
Apocalypse
it is raining tears
they splash and sizzle
in the red hot lava fields
in that rain they dance
who would save the world
their upturned faces looking at clouds blackened
with sparkling, knowing eyes
it is raining hope
and even i have come
to bathe my hardened scars
to feel fresh pain
as the heat of the lava sears my skin
my own tears mingling with the sin
of centuries untold
i am reborn, an urchin wild
my dancing awkward, like a child
or someone very old
that was the day the world was saved
the lava cooled and all who braved
the cold were tested true
in rains that make the world anew
Temptation
A lurid witch, clothed in robes of smile,
All sweetness with the wolf-heart hidden deep,
Waiting to pounce, at once a sudden leap—
While her beauty’s charms the heart beguile.
A powerful envoy sent from Night’s empire,
With a vast array of daft, alluring masks,
When in her hypnotic gaze her victim basks
She burns his soul in her destructive fire.
Her kisses taste like pure, untainted nectar,
When life gets drunk on her false bliss for a while
Her juices quickly change to poison’s rile —
In your anguish you turn sober and detect her.
Her only goal our journey to delay,
She promises joy, yet binds us taut to clay.
Friendship
Heaven’s blessing, earth’s bloom
To conquer the breath of ignorance-gloom.
Two souls in God’s Compassion-Grip:
The beauty and fragrance of friendship.
Dream-Boat
A dream-boat leaves the troubled shores of thought,
The journey of the heart has now commenced,
Life answers with its vista’s vision-fraught
And subtle whispers born from mystic lands.
The vessel glides on swelling waves of joy,
A guiding wind reveals the hidden path,
Life’s dissonants no longer clang or cloy,
Smooth sails the dream-boat through the ocean’s swathe.
Suddenly a fierce wind beats the sails,
Storm-clouds invade the lonely, darkened sky,
The foam-frothed ocean moans and heaves and wails,
A doom-swept hour stirs the havoc tide.
The vessel tosses on its angry waves,
In fate’s abrupt and cruel predicament,
The prophecy of an early sea-born grave,
A cyclone sent as karma’s instrument.
Like lightning Grace leaps from the blackened sky,
A flaming balm to soothe the tempest wild,
The roiling waters cease, the wind’s steep cry
Softens to a breeze and all is mild.
Then breaks the horizon’s monotone array,
Revealing twinkling shores approaching fast.
The dream-boat sails into the noon-swept Day,
Truth’s banner flying from its battered mast.
Poetry
Through ink-born words I bare my soul,
This blameless paper listens to my throes;
Will others read my private woes,
My jarring songs of joy and dole?
Their hearts to affect is not my goal—
I try to capture beauty where she goes,
And be a garden for the seeds she sows,
Truth’s mystic channel is the poet’s role.
Words may also serve as consolation,
A balm to soothe life’s sorrow and its pain,
To share a secret fate, the paper stained
With tears the heart cried in its tribulation.
A poet’s words can penetrate a nation,
His suffering untold not told in vain,
His present struggle is the future’s gain,
Filtered through a diamond inspiration.
Gratitude
What compels the wave to break upon the shore?
By whose bidding speeds the sun across the sky?
Who instigates the autumn leaves to gather on the forest floor
And transforms a lowly worm into a butterfly?
His works we see, but not the Hands that wrought them,
Their whereabouts are shrouded in a mystic hush,
Yet as the fragrant rose is upheld by its thorny stem,
So God by man: His chisel and His brush.
The same Hand that thrust the stars into the Heavens
Built China’s wall and carved a David out of lifeless stone;
He who was inspiration inside Shakespeare’s pen
Moved Rembrandt’s hand and sat on Akbar’s throne.
Yet all the world’s greatness is His passing show,
His Fancy’s Festival, a mere prelude,
While He awaits the sacred hour when the world will grow
Into a symphony of eternal gratitude.