If you want to sleep well at night
Don’t make poetry your passion.
The words will rise and fall all night
Like bubbles in a fish tank.
They will blow soundlessly
Into your weary eyes
And make them heavy and weighed down
With demanding melodies
That must be captured 
Before the morning light
Streams through the curtains.
Your restless brain will tap out the rhythms
Tap tap tap
Like the knocking of a visitor
That must be answered,
Or the scratching of the cat that strayed outside 
Mistakenly in the cold winter
Needing back the warmth of its familiar fireplace.

Try as you will
Images will flit in and out
Like butterflies on the cherry tree
In the backyard and,
Just as
Giving birth has no precise date,
The poem defies sleep
It will be born
Like a whimsical baby
When least expected.
But not before
It has robbed you of 
Patience, and the power 
To pray for a different passion.
                        

I remain in love with Bombay
The city with its old name
Still flows my veins, beats my heart in steady rhythm
The waves of the sea throb my pulse.
My father taught me to love the sea and the city
With its old name.

I stood beside my father’s grave
At the old Jewish cemetery across the racecourse
There was his poem about a shooting star
Engraved on it with a Star of David,
I thought I heard him recite the poem 
I wept, careful not to erase the lines
His voice mellifluous and poignant
He made me fall in love with poetry.

I visited the old house seventeen years ago
Where I played in the garden as a child
With all the neighborhood children
A tall building had replaced the trees and flowers
I gazed at the changed landscape and reminisced,
I saw my father watching happily as I played
He was standing on the stone steps
His eyes like twinkling stars
My father taught me to love trees.

With broken sandals my father walked the streets
He travelled by the crowded trains
He rubbed shoulders with humanity
He wanted to carve poems on the sidewalks
He taught me to embrace the crowds
He taught me to love the city of my birth
To fall in love with Bombay.

My father taught me to love Thoreau
He said not everyone can go ‘to the woods’
One must build a ‘cabin’ in the city
To learn not to lead a life of ‘quiet desperation.’
My father taught me to love the woods, the stars and the city.