RED AND WHITE

blemish of the needle in eye spreads: 
do you still see the moon in the hills, 
outstripping the aura of midnight? 

resilient, waiting for a renaissance, for 
a finger on the lips in dark, to read the 
symptoms, feeling floral in wilderness, 

the reclining Buddha will speak now, 
on stillbirth of a truth in valley of lies, 
telling them the god was sleeping 

in sorrows of world, the spider looks like a 
man’s face, moving with large belly on the 
dried corpses of hapless ants, the art of 

dying, without pain, when the plane was 
diving, splitting into two, unconscious of 
pins and butterballs, in the mouth of mantis

Satish Verma