Singular Identity Or Plural Enigmas Poem by Ananta Madhavan

Some mornings I can see the rising sun
Has moved a tittle,
Just a little,
Beyond the terrace that has blocked
Our serenity of view, the palette of hues,
In subtly-shaded continents of cloud:
White to nimbus dark, pallid blues,
Or pink to scarlet in the mist and vanishings.

All things change, we too, but, but:
Heraclitus, some thirty-odd centuries ago
Said what is obvious to us, as we cling
To the ego as the constant:
The Now-friction of awakening
To self-driven agendas. We must call the firm
That sold the fridge we bought last year.
It has a malfunction: our bottled drinking water
Will not freeze into ice-cubes to quench our thirst
When the mouth feels parched.
But how to find the right phone number we had noted
In the memo pad stowed on the tabletop?

Agreed, we cannot step into the same river twice,
But is it because we have also flowed on like the waters?
The Gita says the Soul has neither birth nor death,
It transcends our mortal morphology.
A poet saw Eternity the other night,
Another hailed the world in a grain of sand.

I am no philosopher or poet, though I know
William Wordsworth rambled over the highlands
Composing “I wandered lonely as a cloud”.
The clouds I see at dawn are morphed,
Mysteriously transcending their identity,
In forms and mass which a Shakepeare character
Could liken to a whale or camel. I am not sure,
But hold on to this thought, for the nonce secure
In what I think is Me, a tone or swara, tenebrous
In some celestial symphonic Mass or Psalm or Hymn,
But it is neither dirge nor threnody.
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6 September,2015, Mysuru, India