Expecting rain, the profile of a day, Wears its soul like a hat....

No words, just a swirl of colours, and as always a little poem, not wholly apposite, but sort of mandatory!

While the hum and the hurry
Of passing footfalls
Beat in my ear like the restless surf
Of a wind-blown sea,
A soul came to me
Out of the look on a face.

Eyes like a lake
Where a storm-wind roams
Caught me from under
The rim of a hat.
I thought of a mid-sea wreck
and bruised fingers clinging
to a broken state-room door.

~ Carl Sandburg ~

The kindred spirit of an inner haze...

I am the mist,
the impalpable mist,
Back of the thing you seek.
My arms are long,
Long as the reach of time and space.

Some toil and toil, believing,
Looking now and again on my face,
Catching a vital, olden glory.
But no one passes me,
I tangle and snare them all.

I am the cause of the Sphinx,
The voiceless, baffled, patient Sphinx.
I was at the first of things,
I will be at the last.

I am the primal mist
And no man passes me;
My long impalpable arms
Bar them all.

Carl Sandburg

In the dusk of day-shapes, blurring the sunset.....

All these years in Shimla, and I simply have not got over our magnificent sunsets. Every single evening is magical. Every single evening reveals new colours, new hues, new shades: blue, orange, lilac, gold, pink, yellow, purple. Each encounter with dusk is unique and spell-binding.

As Sartre says: "At dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil"

~ BETWEEN TWO HILLS ~

Between two hills
The old town stands
The houses loom
And the roofs and treesAnd the dusk and the dark
The damp and the dew
Are there.

The prayers are said
And the people rest
For sleep is there
And the touch of dreams
Is over all.

~ Carl Sandburg ~

Dusk

Dreams in the dusk,
Only dreams closing the day
And with the day’s close going back
To the gray things, the dark things,
The far, deep things of dreamland...

Dreams, only dreams in the dusk,
Only the old remembered pictures
Of lost days when the day’s loss
Wrote in tears the heart's loss.

Tears and loss and broken dreams
May find your heart at dusk...

यूँ भी कभी हुआ है, अकेली-सी शाम में
धुंधले-से इक चिराग के चेहरे के पास-पास
सरगोशियाँ-से ढूँढती हैं जब तुम्हारे होंठ

आंखों में यूँ बिलक के मचलती है एक बूँद
जैसे यतीम होटों पे मचले तुम्हारा नाम....