Pettalic Love Times

SYED AMEERUDDIN'S POETRY

As Beatrice haunted Dante like a passion, Ameeruddin is obsessed with the thoughts of his beloved.

His is a repository of scuttled truths and a museum of irrefutable facts-refuted not by empirical discoveries, but by mysterious decisions to experience differently from time to time. It worked in the totems and taboos of ancients, the pyramids of Egypt, the cosmology of Dante, and the theory of expanding universe.   Echoes from abyss abound.

At heart, all poetry is memory and celebration. Its joy is not mere pleasure, its lamentation not mere weeping, and its despair not mere despondency. It is concerned with the stature of things—a discovery, a colonisation of inward­ness. It begins in the vitality of adventures and ends in display of exploding images.

Ameeruddin dives into the darkness of thoughts, in unbidden suggestions, in multitudinous waves and currents all at once flashing and rushing in dreams. He glimpses great tides in the clairvoyance of passion and in the nightly rising of the somnambulist. He communes with dark powers—as Poe, Kierkegard, Rimbaud and Von Gogh-raging beneath tranquil everydayness. Such visitations come only to masters of verses.

The poet has inexhaustible flow of raging vitality. It is difficult to decipher his goal. Words fall with the impact of a blow with utmost precision. His phrases are weighty.   Thousand shafts burn.

Innate eroticism can never be overcome completely. Stephen Spender translating Lorca*s "Faithless Wife*' scales several peaks:

"1 touched her sleeping breads

and they opened to me completely.

The starch of her petticoat Sounded in My ears

Tike a piece of silk slashed by ten knives

.......     ..........    .........

I took off my tie.

she took off her dress ....

her skin so fine nor do moonlit crystals shine

with such brilliance.

Her thighs escaped me like two fishes surprised...."

 

Ameeruddin surpasses Lorca in ifriagistic delicacy as ifl "Reminiscences"—"

 

'They met

when dtisk licked the rubicund eve

unique passioned halvesunned

close and closer

limbs wdded

they rolled over shores

dark with stars ..."

Dr. Mohamed Yasin, hailing Syed*s achievements, say, the poet has tasted and experienced love in different moods and situations and has successfully envisioned the sensual impressions in some of his best known pieces. Usually the treatment of love reverberates with echoes of romantic pathos, but something beyotid mere sensuous gratification* also haunts him.

Syed has established his originality, sensitiveness multidimensional imagery, keenness of perception and vision in his poetry.

Prof. Niranjan Mohanty stresses that Syed's poetry must be examined as a poet of love for whom love emerges not merely as a meaningful subject but a visible metaphor for transcending Reality.

Dr. P. N. Shukla observes that, Syed is a seeker, a wanderer, and a lover too. He would not rest until he realizes the end of his journey. Juxtaposition of the images of mere physicality and blissful eternity makes these verses wear a great immensity and diversity.

Dr. A. N. Dwivedi remarks that Syed Ameeruddin's poetry is largely amourous in content but metaphysical in its tone.   There is sheer imagistic delicacy in his verses.

Dr. Richard Eberhart a noted American poet comments that the whole of Ameeruddin's verse is lyrical and subjec­tive silhouting an inexhaustible flow of poets raging vitality. The meditative awareness of the divinity hidden in love is unique in Ameeruddin's creative imagination.

Dr. Panos D. Bardis, yet another American poet asserts that, Ameeruddin is a realist of the senses. The two realities the earth and the soul, are firm in his own. There is verbal magic in his verses. He feels poetry like fire in his hands. His strong sense of suggestivity, gift for sharp imagery, and zest for full participation in life, even where it seems purely sensuous, makes him strikingly different in the contemporary arena of world poetry.

Ameeruddin's subjective poetry grows symbolic and musical as we find in  Baudelaire, Mallarme and Valery.

This poem on "A New Love" is unrivalled in love poetry.   Syed is first and Rest nowhere.

When we sat face to face

We are like the waves

Gently marching towards the eye of the storm.

When we close our eyes

We descend

The crumbling staircase to oblivion —

A new day breaks from our visual rhapsody

A gesture.   A whisper.   A word.

A new love springs.  A new dawn dances.

 

We march into the visual ravens:

Doors open Into fitful past —

The cool wind shatters

Into splinters of glass.

The agony of solitude

And opaque life haunts around

The sun gently explodes

And in its fractured mirror

We watch the controversy of hurts

Of the present social debris.

 

Ameeruddin's poems are an ascension towards love. He attains through love the fullness of Reality. Love yields him its greatest treasure. The act of love surges and resurges. He traces the erotic multi-facets of love and presents in every evocative way the process and evolution of love from the ideal and platonic to the pragmatic and Surrealistic trends of our time :

Gypsy river runs through my bones. This road where you and I stand Leads back to a barren land We have left far behind Let us part.

I must wander.

Do not follow me.

Let the love

               in your eyes

               blossom

               into secret

               Constellations".

 

"Petallic Love Times" are Ameeruddin's lyrsical offerings at the altar of Love, celebrating all the facets, longing, anguish and exhiliration.

 

When you first came, a mystic myth

you came, quite as the rain that never felL

A fragrance that never revealed.

As a bard, I whispered words

I had never known,

And shall now never forget.

Now your lonesong satchel is fall

of these words, which have grown

Into secret songs.  We have known,

And loved, and shared what only

Souls can share in lyric guilt.

 

Here he experiments with the tradition of love—with its myriad myths, with its varied exuberant exultations of blissful peaks—and abysmal despondencies. He celebrates love in the convention of Kaiidasa—and sometimes in the vibrant vicisitudes of Khaleel Gibran.

 

The winding galleries of his mind unfurl strange tunes. There is verbal magic in his verses. He feels poetry like fire in his hands.   He replaces meanings by suggestions.

Nature to him is a merciless genetic force which transmits to its creatures its own frenzied fury. Love is stripped of its sentimental wrappings and reduced to the starkness of its violent rapture. Ameeruddin hungers for static inward illumination as Lorca did in "Luvia" —

"Love is awakened

in the greyness of its rhythm.

      Our interior sky

contains a triumph of blood.

      But all our optimism

turns to sorrow

       To Contemplate

the dead drops on the glass....

 

Each drops of Water

        trembles on the dim glass

Leaving divine

        wounds of diamond".

There are poets of water

        who have seen and meditate

Things which

        the vast crowds of rivers ignore".

 

As Ameeruddin says:

 

Love awake or love asleep

Is a feathered dream ....

....... ........ ......

Life without love and longing

Is a soul dark and heart opaque.

 

Syed's poetry is the confrontation of his whole being \vith Reality — a basic struggle of the soul, mind and body to comprehend life, to loving order to chaos, and by will and insight create communicable verbal forms for the delight of mankind.

As Juan Lopez-Morillas says of Lyrical primitivism, the world streches before Ameeruddin as an undifferentiated massawe taking the place of understanding and impression is a substitute for analysis. Life is a supreme spectacle and the world of forms dances and peaks to feverish contortions. He dramatises the conflict between primitivism and modernity.

Ameeruddin is restless of the waltzing civilisation. His poetry is lyrical, his feelings flame as images and has the stamp of unique personality. This makes him the finest and most sensitive of contemporary poets.

KRISHNA SRINIVAS

11th  July, 1988.

POEM

PETALLIC LOVE TIMES

Part-I

I saw you stranded on a lonesome sandstrip

Turning round your ragged sight at the duskfall

To encounter the sandstorm crossing the highway.

I observed you a woman alone, hopes lost

No mast to hold, no bower to shelter

winding the lonesong street,

With volcanoes in the tresses,

Chasing the whirlwind midnight train.

 

I sow you clung to the woods,

The hills and the oceans.  You pleaded

With the storms, the fire and the fierce night.

You screamed, you yelled -

All in vain.  Your voice echoed in the twilight.

No one answered.

You rushed from one memory to the next

And stamped on each door.  None of the doors

Opened for you. Only the fog swirled

Around you. The silent beside the

Deep valley mirrored your agony.

I know, all you sought was an answer,

A compassion, a dewy touch.

All you got was silence, and your lonesong.

 

I do not know, where anything begins,

Simply it happens : It happens !

When I saw you, the compassion of the storms

Filled every fibre of my body.

In the prism of your eyes, I watched

My lonesome songs reverberating.  Your

Moony face echoed the rhapsody of my

Cherished dreams.  In the twilighty corridors

Of your eyes found my long obsessed search,

And felt as though, a wave facing a wave.

Thus I plunged into your deep saga :

A delightful doll, destined to doom.

 

You bathed in the flood of moonlight, that nighty

on the silvery shores of scintillating sea.

Then you hugged me with tranquil rivers

Of spirituality oil your bruised shoulders.

Thus, you rose in another city, shedding

The past of the barren lands.

Fugitive moon beckoned you to the restless waves

Under that teaming transparent sky

I saw the twilight rising between

Shadows of your face : A new

Radiance. A new dawn emerged.

While the rivers of guilt grow

Into the secret contours of your bodyscape.

A new zeal. A new rage. A new passion.

Thus sudden enlightening sets fire in your" tresses.

And rain enters my heart through your

Open eyes.  I am washed, bleached

Like a water bianshed shore by the restive waves.

 

Whe'n the sun sets amidst the grim'

Savage silence of the hills, you cartfe

With the azure longuor of the desert,

I filled your golden form in the interior of my soul

When I hold you close to my hairy chest

My heart throbs with rhapsody

Mind filled with ecstasy and

Soul simmers with symphony

In that purple mood

Flood gates of passion break.

I hold your rosy cheeks on the blues

Of my firy palms—and look into your

Blazing eyes with spring flames. I

In your eyes I watch fireflies light up

The future manuscript of my poems.

I am space launched into a golden paradise :

A continuous gaze into your sparkling eyes—

The eyes that threw the floodlight in my dusky soul

The eyes that illumined my winding path

The eyes that revealed the lotus of wisdom

To my opaque mind

The eyes that brought the torrent of roses

To my barren heart.

Now I rise to your dazzling eyes

I live in your eyes and dream of your eyes.

I drown and bask in the white radiance of your eyes.

 

Because,

The sun never shines as bright as your eyes.

 

When you first came, a mystic myth

You came, quite as the rain that never fell,

A fragrance that never revealed.

As a bard, I whispered words.

I had never known,

And shall now never forget.

Now your lonesong satchel is full

Of these words, which have grown

 

Into secret songs. We have known,

And loved, and shared what only

Souls can share in lyric guilt.

There can be nothing truer when

This darkness flowers.

I do not know, where anything begins.

It happens. The rest - solitude,

And symphony of silence follows....

 

You came upon me

In that nectar spring night

Perplexed with twilight's tantrums

I once again peeped in memories' glass eyes

And stirred the honey filled cells

Of my distant dreams.

And discovered the sweety of my golden realms

only mute hurricane vibrations

And scissoring silence transcends in between us.

Then lilting Whispers echoed :

 

I am the moon blanshed ocean

You are the moon since I loved you

The cool breeze brings orchestral melodies

At my heart's window

As I visualise the petallic pleasures

Of a strange destiny.

This path of seven colours where we stand

Leads to infinity of golden summer

we have dreamt long before.

 

Again, you came to me

In that thundering outpour

We stood clasped in each others arms

To celebrate the smoky rainscape

Thus we shared the love in lyric splendour

I entwined you in the snaky grasp

Of my feverish arms, and touched

The secret mounts of your body

In that passion swirled surrounding.

Then I filled my hands

With your dark tresses

To resurrect our love

To the summer splendours.

Memories never fade

Like the footprints on the shores.

The seasons slip

Into your dark tresses.

You combed my dew dripping

Hair with your fitful fingers

And stared into my eyes

With launching sagas

In your bewitching looks.

 

Thus you brought the whisper of storm

In this summer of petallic love times.

Twilight turned into dark grey.

Only the fugitive moon watching

Our embraces in each others clasp.

The mischievous wind around us

Never trembles as wild as our hearts

When lips touch each others.

Then, with oceans in my viens,

Lightning in my heart,

Hurricane in my mind

And fire on my palms

Looked into your sense mirroring

 

Musichewn eyes, and watched

The lovelorn twinkle of smothered dreams

Grow into secret constellations.

I love you, you love me,

Sweetnothings exchanged

With the gentle touches

Of honey soaked tongues.

Then you surrounded me with

The oceans in your embrace

Weispering rainbow melodies:

 

Desire me, and fill my soul

With your lotus presence !

Thus in that strange blue light

Of the fugitive moon, we experienced

The girgling confluence of meeting waters.

Silence grows in an opaque sky:

Birds chirp, sea gulls glide

Sun trembles under the waves

Twilight is scissoring through the mysty dawn

Our fragrance emitting tongues

Twisted in juicy kisses

And our embers wrapped bodies

Burnt in tendrils of our embrace.

In that incense sprinkled moon

We crushed the early sun

In between our quaky bossoms.

The morning wind bathed us

With cool and refreshing sympohnies—

We stood there, hand in hand

Watching lovelorn seascape

Kissing the twilighty forehead of horizon.

Then turning face to face

 

We whispered enigmas in syllables of silence.

You came to me that evening

In that dusky twilight like an empty river

With oceans of unfulfilled springludes

In your tresses.

With piled horrors in heaps

Of your ghostly past and bleak future.

Your satchel full with lonesome songs

Sans dreams, tears and solitude.

Hurricanes of compassion

Whirled in my gypsy veins :

The nowhereman in me

Found a meadow, a green pasture

I saw the oncoming storm

Of winter blast the ruins

Of my haunting memory.

I saw in you my vague

Poetic search.  An artist's Eden.

 

You saw your demolished dreams

Enter a throughway with no returning.

Volcanoes erupted in your blood streams.

Cycles of spring reeled in your

Whirly mind.    Recollections reverberated,

Then you saw the strings of your

Spirit in my simmering languid eyes,

And visualised all your half baked dreams

The brokerr rainbows .of your virgin fancy.

In my pulsating petallic presence.

Rivers of pure passion swirled

In your bruised heart.

Muteness in you played melodies .

 

You saw your hopes dream

Coming towards you—

"Is he real" you whispered, or

The mind's "vain mirage ?"

 

Then the tranquil of the dawn settled on your head.

You threw a long treasured kiss and said :

'Glad you came.  Glad you recognised'.

Then philosophised—spiritualised :

'Give life, give me love'

In this passionate throbbing present

Take me to the world of oblivion

To the world of purple paradise

Of our long subdued dreams.

Give me life.   Fill my soul with your lovev

In this mystic moment

Let me caress wit inflate reality

With love's hungry arms.

 

At a far distance,

We heard the little birds singing

In virgin boughs of the trees,

Winging through the air

With their little hopes and dreams.

Thus we parted with a sentinel song :

Love awake or love asleep

Is a feathered dream...

 

Part - II

 

Oh, the joy of spring and summer again

The sun smiled down upon this quite sea

That reflected our hidden dreams.

The evening twilight has spread

Radiant blossoms and sweet perfumes.

I remember the dusky evening

I met you on that lonestreet

Wih your satchel bellowing with lonesome songs,

When you came first, a mystic myth,

A fragrance that never revealed.

I also remember the words I Whispered

Which have grown into sweet incantations

We have known* and loved and shared

What souls can share in lyric splendour.

It all began like that

Like a sudden onset of a cyclone in a turbulent ocean

 

You know, how our dreams realised

And found each others strange destiny,,

Through fractured suns and fatigued evenings.

You came to me a strange woman

Singing in the mist a song of blackmoon,

You sang to me sadeyed songs

That unravelled my haunting myths

I evoked purple mamories

Within the wooden scapes of your eyes.

Thus our boats reached their destined shore,

 

I was a wanderer by a lonely sea.

Gypsy rivers run through my bones.

Tired of my wandering

In search of compatible

Pebbles with my delightful dreams

When I saw you,

Stroms of compassion rushed in my gypsy blood.

I saw you as my hidden dream.

My poetic search. My creative zeal :

My unwritten poem. My soul's eden.

A wandering halt. A meeting of night & day.

And a rapturous reach of the blue horizon.

 

Again, you came upon me' that evening

In the* summer of tender lovetimes.

On that sun bathed incence spread shores

With encased thoughts and rejuvenated deskes;

We encircled in each others arms—

To steal the colours from the rainbow.

I looked at the shining contours of your body

Passions jumped and rode

On the hooves of wild horses—

We both know what we are thinking about :

Beneath our skin snakes creep,

Flames engulfed our hissing bodies ;

I gently cartessed your breasts

And slowly turned your nutty nipples—

 

You affectionately combed my hair

With your feverish fingers

You kissed my forehead and whispered:

Let us meet from time to time

Not too often, only when we can.

Glad you came. Glad you recognised.

Give me life. Give me love.

You are my dream. Fill my soul with your desire.

Now, I live, move and breath

In every thoughr of you. You are my world,

The epitome of all my joy, all my gladness.

The mystries of life begin and end in you.

 

You looked up at the dawn,

Your heart, a morning glory

Opened its petals to a new heaven

Sand—storms growing in the desert

Moon—floors crawling in the sea.

Newly awakened desires

Licked the inns of your dim heart

With winding fire ond flame

And walked in snake—fangs

Through your heaving body.

In that petalled purple moment

Your mind whirled with my thoughts

Your soul filled with the fragrance of my love.

Morning wind fresh in the twilighty dawn,

Musichewn, mischievous, sings love lyrics.

In that golden rage of ragas

You heard my name on the lips of wind

As it touched your longing heart

And filled your soul with roses of my love.

 

Thus that golden dawn

Opened the portals of fresh desires

And kindled yout heart with flames of fire

That transcend its music

Through deep dales and pastures green.

Dreams of vague memories

Of bouyant virgin fancy

Long treasured in the deeps of heart

Unrolled tapestry of agony and ecstasy,

While your spirit flies to meet my soul

Weaving new golden webs

Before the corridors of my mind.

At that music stirred mood

Your mindscape echoed rahpsodies

of sweet love, scintillating life and hissing  hopes

You dived deep down the memory lane

Came out to touch the jingling blues of zenith.

Then dishevelled your dark tresses

Over the canopy of the spectrum of stars :

In love no one knows the origins

No one knows the goal

It's a purple paradise we create

The petalled golden webs of timeless moments

Of evergreen that matters -

If s a pleasant perception of soul,

A pride to plunge into the flames of heart

That makes love - a garden of delight.

Therefore, let*s know each other by our smell

By the stir of our soul,

By the beat of our heart,

And by the breaths of our being.

You are my soul's search

The sweety of my dreams

An artist's conception

A poet's imagination—

I climbed the water falls

Keeling and roaring on a sheet of water

And bent the rainbow in the blue skies

When you dripped nectar from your mouth:

I love you.   you love me!

With gentle touches of honey soaked tongue,

I saw blue waves playing

Like sea birds in the depths of your eyes

I watched the secret wildfires of your lust

In the golden glades of your heart.

Your face reflected the colour of faraway rain

Your nowhere hair raged a thundering storm.

The night is quiet.    The sea is calm.

For it is scared of the wildscream spring.

Sensuous rivers swirled all around us

As you embraced me with lovelorn warmth

The night enveloped in our

Sweet whispers of oneness...

 

Tonight let me face my strange destiny.

The honeied memories and petalled pleasures

Drifted to the shores like the foamy waves.

Thus, we celebrated our togetherness—

The confluence of the swirling rivers—

The meeting of the distant sea

With the azure sky—at the horizon...

 

Throughout that night

On that moon - bathed sands

We drifted apart and

Drifted into each other.

We entwined like tender tendrils

with the elements in full cry.

Only the roars of the distant sky

And the fugitive moon watching

Hurricane of passion swirled around us

And violence in our blood flooded :

At that lotus moment -

I rested my head

On your shrieking thighs

And burried my face

In your buzzing soft belly

Then touched gently with my juicy tongue

Your aching forehead,

Fluttering, feverish eyelids

And flames of lilting lips.

I touched your breast with adoration

And caressed the contours of your waist

And thighs with admiration.

Then whispered into your ears :

You are a beautiful poem.

 

A sculptor's dream.    A statue of Ajanta...

Thus* I touched, smelt all the secret wine waves of your body

And swayed with them in every movement

And listened to the orchestra of sensual melody.

 

In that trance of romantic rhapsody

Suddanly, ycu twisted tantalisingly

With the twists and wriggles of a fitful snake —

And enclosed my body swarming,

I kissed you on the neck

And tickled your hard nipples - in that

Honey splashing, nectar mood -

ln your ecstasy, you possessed me hard to yourself

To touch the dizzy zeniths of exotic heights.

At that* I entered you as the evening sun

Enters into the dusky deep ocean :

 

Next morning we woke up

To the twilighty radiance of morning siim

Lilting* juvenile breeze of the dawn

Tickled us into fresh vistas of smiling grass*

I held your dew — twinkling face

On my serene palms —

And saw you vibrant as new leaf

Fresh from the cosmic touch,

Newly plucked—and washed in rain.

Then, I planted a fresh kiss on your rosy cheek.

Your kisses are warmer Chan a sunset hues.

I don't need an  edens' glory when I have yon.

 

Thus, we met from time to time

To build a purple paradise of

spiritual bliss and sensual symphony.

To be in love is holding the moon.

In your arms and walking through the rainbows.

Life without love and longing

Is a soul dark and a heart opaque —

Life without love is a spirit tangled and heart smothered,

Thus, as lovers we met,

Experienced eternity with touching grace.

As lovers we met,

Celebrated tfie scintillating melody of flesh and blood,

Mute we walked among the golden glades

And realised 'forever' as the restive waves,

 

Part - III

 

It all ended like that -

Like a sudden devastating deluge

Leaving the mute symphony of a cemetry.

Our loves deep dales,

Pastures green, golden dawns

And twilighty rage of ragas

Smothered - and Vanished into

The dark - savage sky.

The jingling blues of zenith

The lilting flames of Horizon

The smoky rainscape

The resplendent landscape

All turned opaque and

Slipped into white wildefliness.

The lyric splendour of our loves

Spiritual glory and ephemeral joy

Is twisted, trampled and crushed

By the hissing hurricanes of horror

And tumultuous eclipse of time

Into the shrieking realm of vast nothingness.

Petallic Love Times

Now echoes from dismal abyss abound -

Atlast I realised. Bells of reality reverberated.

At heart all love is memory

And mute celebration of souls.

Love is a delectable discovery

A cosy colonisation of inwardness.

The esoteric ethos we have known and shared

What simmering souls can share in Kalidioscopic ecstasy.

As lovers we met.

As lovers we remain forever

celebrating the scintillating

Melody of Eden's glory.

Marching forever and forever

To touch the cosmic crescendo

Among the golden glades of eternity

Unmindful of the volconic erruptions

Of times titilating cruelty.

 

You are still my dream

The picture of my inward joy

I still fill my soul with your desire

I still live in your eyes and dream of your eyes

You are still the same woman alone

Of my lonesong street.

I am still the same nowhereman

Watching the fireflies lightup

The future manuscript of my poems.

I know, you are my enchanting moon

Since I am your turbulent sun.

I still visualise the petallic pleasures

we experienced and

The purple paradise we explored

Of a strange and deluge like destiny.

Love at heart

Is memory and celebration.

To be in love is holding the sun.

Love fortified or love fractured

Is a many splendoured dream.

( Book Description - Pettalic Love Time - POET PRESS INDIA -Chennai in 1988 - 9 Poems in 52 Pages )