simonhlilly

DREAM BETWEEN DREAMS

It shall be called
The dream between dreams.
It shall have the sound of rudra veena
Howling the low, long song
Of mountains.
A doorway that vanishes
In walls and moments,
Hunters of persistence and cunning
That track betweens
With such eager precision.

A sepia lithograph of ancestors
Scattered with scratched code.
A stuttered sunrise,
A mumbled equation.
Fragmented, woven storeys.
Intercepted thought-
A patterning of stars.

It shall take beauty to itself.
It shall wear a body
Suspended and gently packed
With birdsong.
It shall have a sunrise
Located in a northern way.
Magnificence untranslated and untranslatable.
A verticality, a rotation, a specific gravity.

Freed from the body
It twists to a certain extent,
A mind will take colours to itself
As murmurs of joy.
A shuffled deck of cards
(Where all images are constantly changing),
Vapour words uttered to themselves and gone,
Drawn from all tomorrows,
A suffering of beauty.

The rudra veena says:
“Music is the very means
Ye shall venture through vastnesses,
The telemetries of time and space,
Control panel of deity,
Bender of physics, answer to worlds,
Mating call of galaxies.”

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The rudra veena is an instrument of South India, a pumped up, pimped up sitar, more growling even than the surbhahar ( a bass sitar). It has two huge gourds at either end, that wrap around the person holding it, and a long,wide fretboard. It has a monumental, alien sound in recordings. Live, it probably vibrates bones and deepest soul. Beyond human, the rudra veena is the player, human being the instrument.
( search ‘rudra veena’ into youtube and give yourself a thrill!).

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