Altering Eyes Behold The Scudding Clouds At Dawn Poem by Ananta Madhavan

At daybreak I step into the fourth-floor balcony and see
The scud of clouds and the chromatic repertoire
Of sun-tinged skyline. It alters by the second,
The strata of dark to light, pallid pink to carmine.

A stack of saris piled tight on a shelf in a shop,
A silk emporium right across the temple
Across the sacred temple in Mylapore
For Kapaleeswara, which we did not enter
When grandma took me to the beach in the old Dodge.
She had to buy three saris for a niece’s wedding;
She liked to feel the silk, the patterns of Kanjivaram looms.
The sales-woman displayed garments by the yard,
The borders of brocade, the contrasting hues.


The small cloudlets fluffy, insistent on their identities,
Are melding into layers or vapour continents in the breeze,
Some to merge into mammoth shapes of unknown beasts.
It is a transient cartography of haze and mist. No map is final.

So let the dawn revoke the grudges and complaints
Of tasks unfinished or undone, the tedium
Of disappointed hopes, the certainty of failure;
Let me thank the way it happens momently, this new Now,
Gazing fondly at the scudding clouds, this dawn.