Weakened sun
Weakened lungs
Weakened resolve
Beauty and ugliness
Joy and hardship
Kindness and predation
This land of extremes
This country of paradox
Creating beauty from ugliness
Cabs stacked up
End to end
Filled with fares
Or seeking them
Crowded shops
Pedestrians
Littered streets
Swept clean by morn’
So full of life
Activity
This crowded block
Where could it be
With utter abandon
She runs
Gangly limbs
All astrewn
Head rolled back
Now lolling
Side to side
She runs
Only for the joy
It seems
Of running
Down Bengali Tola
And as my camera
Finally finds her
She finds me
While the bells clang
Insistently
In golden Varanasi
Where the priests
Celebrate Shiva
With a dance of fire
Beautiful
Were it a morning mist
Or a shroud of fog
Pierced by morning sun
But smoke permeates the atmosphere
Even the train compartment
In which I ride
With every breath
Smoke
I struggle to see
The beauty here
In a world
Of grim and grime
Of damage and refuse
The hard task
On this spirit path
Find the beauty
In all things
But there is colour
Form and texture
Elements underlie design
And the dynamic
Of a captured moment
In an old man’s morning
I drink it in
This perfection
This preternatural beauty
My spirit soars
My arms outstretched
Imagining, I’m a hawk in the wind
And then
On some glorious sunset evening
I see the world in silhouette
And understand how
We are all the same
And then it does
But only for a moment
Until something else
Pulls it away
In this visual cacophony
Of a culture traveler’s feast
Pix to Words 