Poetry as Sanctuary – A column where we explore poetry as a means of expression for voices of the South Asian Diaspora.
(Featured Image: Lalit Kumar skydiving)
I am fascinated with adventure sports and I happen to like poetry. While adventure sports push us out of our comfort zone to experience the euphoria that lies beyond fear, poetry helps us to explore the world in a more vivid way.
Adventure sports provide personal growth and renewal through physical energy.
Poetry is a mental work-out, rejuvenating the soul to provide an enhanced capacity to experience all the beauty in this world.
The famous mountaineer, Edmund Hillary said, “It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”
This rings true. When exerting oneself for any endurance sports like mountaineering or long-distance running, the first battle one fights is in his or her own mind. Despite the pain or fatigue, if one decides to press on, the physical challenges of distances or mountains are not impossible to be conquered. I feel that mental courage and fortitude can be easily cultivated by reading and writing positive/affirmative poetry that gives wings to your dreams, power to your vision, and courage to your mission.
Reading and writing poetry has provided me with numerous hours of pure joy and the right ambience for self-contemplation. A poem can capture the most complex emotions and distill them down to few words that are pleasing to the auditory senses, apart from being appealing to the ‘thinking’ brain. I have been scribbling verses in English from my high school days. After spending more than a decade in the Bay Area and outside India, I find myself equally drawn to the inexorable charm of my mother tongue, Hindi.
During this ‘lockdown’ period, I found myself gorging upon the books and the writings of Hindi stalwarts. In the process, stumbled upon the beauty of Urdu ghazals and sensibilities (‘janib’). I was drawn towards the natural imagery and auditory pleasure of Urdu words, especially when reading or hearing ghazal and shayari. It seems that the Urdu language is meant for writing and reciting poetry. As an Indian / South Asian immigrant, perhaps I have found my sanctuary in reading, writing, and hearing Hindi/Urdu poetry after losing touch for almost a decade. English comes naturally to me, but I realized that poetry in other Indian languages leaves an equally profound impression on my mind. And this feeling snowballed into a love…
In a moment of creative burst, I find myself unwittingly scribbling in Hindi, like:
आरज़ू थी, ज़िंदगानी रहे
जीएं तो शौक से।
ज़िंदादिली मिली , हम बदले
अब जीएं तो बेखौफ्फ़ से।
– ललित
(Translated in English)
I used to wish, to live a life of luxury
I met my passion and I changed,
Now I wish to live a life of fearlessness.
Perhaps, it has a tinge of my new-found passion for adventure sports, who can tell!
This love for both poetry and adventure found its outlet in a creative verse that I penned a couple of months back, called, ‘The Second Mountain.’ We all want to be successful and happen to get into the career rat race with the hope of reaching some mythic destination and we start climbing that mountain – probably for most of us, our first mountain. But when we get there, we don’t find happiness and fulfillment to the extent that we dreamed about. So we look for the second mountain, which is symbolic of climbing the mountain of a ‘Cause’ that is larger than the self, the irony is that until we get to the top of the first mountain, we usually don’t realize that.
Metaphorically speaking, while climbing the mountain was a calling for my ‘adventure seeking’ soul, penning down this idea in relation to finding my ‘Cause’ was a calling for my ‘poetry loving’ soul.
Image taken by Lalit Kumar
The Second Mountain
Driven, ambitious and passionate
He had ascended the mountain peak
Striving relentlessly, with a singular obsession
To climb, to strive and to reach to the top.
The panorama was striking from his vantage point
He felt like the conqueror who defeated all
The wave of happiness swept like the breeze,
Invincible he felt, superior he thought in his mind.
As the breeze calmed down, he felt an eerie silence
Loneliness gnawed at his heart, the emptiness echoed in his viscera.
What was the point of it all? He thought to himself
His singular achievement meant so little to others.
Contemplating to himself, he narrowed his gaze
And saw the second mountain across the valley.
And lo and behold, it was teeming with people all around
He hurriedly climbed down and trekked across the valley.
As he approached nearer, he saw people helping each other ascend the mountain
Together they climbed and took the tumble together, negotiating the sharp bents on the way
He soon realized, it’s not what you achieve individually
But joy is in how you give away your energy in the pursuit of affecting a positive change.
Joy is in helping, in giving, in supporting
The Cause that deeply moves you
And making it larger than
Just your individual self.
So climb the first mountain, if you must
To check your fitness on the way …
But remember, it’s the second mountain
Where your impact will pave the others’ way.
The language of poetry can touch one’s soul and spark a sense of creativity. I advocate for everyone to read and write poetry. You are invited to join the group calledPoetry of Diaspora in Silicon Valley, which hosts a weekly poetry reading.
Lalit Kumar works in the Technology sector but retains an artist’s heart. He likes to read and write poetry, apart from indulging in adventure sports from time to time. Recently, he started curating famous works of poetry (and occasionally his own).
like curtains you fall back and forward in the golden hour
of the darker lights
hidden, open, quiet
breathe, you’re loud, soft to touch
hold me against your skin if only our eyes linger
blue, your footsteps reside and awake like waves between our limbs your heart- pink, and red lips in purple
hue
you, look at me like I look at you and bend, straighten
curve, fall back, dance to the soundless music and the play of our fingers, foggy and green when we overlap— stop
breathe
I count your moles on the hazel lenses I call my own, you—
do you feel the cracks?
crevices in my skin pour into your heart walls that are grey, bleed out the dark and dusk draws out our light
you and me and our thorns white under the moonlight you, you
“let’s swim?”
in the craters of this space lets enclose ourselves in the little cage and again— hidden, naked, brown
reflections spoke honesty and you were so profound, a dip on one side of your cheek calling out the smile on my face— dimples, how quaint in this quiet forest where leaves are singing and we remain still, restless
move, my head on your neck and you move again with our hand on each waist
sway, to the soundless music that plays from the red of our pain
love, into the night and the pinkish golden haze
fall into water and stay dry, breathe with me, let our eyes linger, stay,
Stay.
Swati Ramaswamy is a recent graduate from UC Davis and is an aspiring creative writer who loathes speaking in the third person.
IC held its third Desi Poetry Reading, in collaboration with Matwaala, on December 3, 2020, which was moderated by Srishti Prabha and Kanchan Naik. The topic was certainly timely – Uncertainty and Change.
After a quick introduction by Pramila Venkatewaran, the co-founder of Matwaala, the Desi Poetry Reading was kicked off by a prolific and accomplished high school poet.
Sara Garg started the evening with a reading of an experiential poem called 2020, that captured the universal feeling of waiting, waiting for the count to go to zero. Another tender poem was about the mini sparks of light that are the front-line workers who face darkness, terror, and monsters while just having each other while they cope with uncertainty. Blood Questions was hard-hitting, speaking dramatically about BLM and our common humanity as it took on the voice of blood as it poured out of the chest of a Black young man as he is killed by blue and brass. In Sunset Sunrise, she gives eloquent voice to the uncertainty we live with during the pandemic, finally admitting she cannot see if the sun is rising or setting, whether hope is ascendent or not. In an answer to a question, Sara attributed her sense of rhythm to the early influence of Usha Akella (co-founder of Matwaala) when she was in 4th grade, as she learned to write a poem about a banana. This was a story of affection that Sara shared with the listeners, a sweet moment of connection, one that most of us can engage with, and that lifted the weight of uncertainty to one of positive change.
R. Cheran, a poet and professor, writes creatively in Tamil. He shared four parts of a powerful translated piece called On the Street, Anytime. His poem had vivid images, of jackfruits, leaves, and bodies run over by tanks on the street, blood seeping into paddy fields, and leaves being the only witnesses to bodies getting together anytime. Repetitions of Anytime, built into a crescendo as he conjured images of extreme contrast – blood, sperm, and poems written on colored pieces of paper, on the street, anytime. He sets the stage in memories of experiencing and witnessing slices of the genocide in Sri Lanka. The poet shifts to potholes in snowy weather, covered in ice, that refill with the blood of 2 boys who could be his sons, shot by the white policeman. Black brave boys whose blood fills the pothole, not once, but twice. In the final fourth part of the poem, Cheran speaks of poverty of the soul, of being left by a lover, one who takes almost everything away with her, but the poem refuses to go with her, the one whose first line is, On the Street, Anytime.
R. Cheran shared another short poem that was equally evocative of remembered trauma as he sketched out the scene of Indian soldiers, a woman held down, a child thrown into a well, and the well that is now without a voice to even say Aiyyo. Cheran’s poems are certainly not “easy listening” but instead pull the listener into a well of traumatic memories and images, the work of a master story-teller, craftsman, and poet. In response to a question by Srishti Prabha about how he balances violence and beauty, Cheran said that the genocide he witnessed and survived cannot be written in words or taught through a lens of sociology or anthropology, that he has portrayed but the tip of an iceberg and such horror can only be begun to be experienced through an art form such as poetry.
I have to take a break in writing this now, and walk around, as I try to shake off and metabolize the intensity of revisiting and closely listening to this part of the reading.
Kalpna Singh-Chitnis, a poet, writer, and film-maker, continued the evening. In a poem about the pandemic, one of the stark images she drew was of the Faceless One stealing all the faces that have disappeared behind masks, likening it to Kabuki dancers magically stealing faces and tucking them away in their kimonos. In a hard-hitting poem titled E.R., she speaks of holding the ground like a tree in a storm, not collapsing or vomiting, but holding in her internal injuries, and dying inside without being noticed. In The Salt of a Woman, anger and outrage jump off the words, her story older than civilization, questioned, blamed, conquered, gifted, dismissed, shamed. In IF, she writes of the only power a survivor of sexual assault may have, in telling others what not to do if she is killed, do not hang the perpetrators, she says – they will be born again and do it again. Hopelessness permeates the poem but ends with dignity. Tell your sons about me, she asks of women, preach me as a sermon, she asks of the preachers, write me as an epic, she asks of the writer.
I believe the BLM movement’s rise in the summer of 2020, empowered many of us in the desi community to finally speak openly of our own experiences of racial discrimination in the United States. Microaggressions are carried in the body, held on to for years, taken out every now and then, and re-examined through various lenses such as – why did the teacher not speak up, why did I not speak up, as if it would have been easy, as if it would have found validation at the time. I think many will identify with the process, the self-doubt, the worry of being heard, being believed, and the fear of having our experiences being discounted
Singh-Chitnis bravely shares a poem 25 years in the making and birthing. In this final poem, Kalpna addresses these excoriations – I am sitting there like the stump of a tree, still sitting there like the stump of a tree, still sitting there in that classroom. The lectures begin and end, she says, but the question remains. She is still waiting for the professor to speak up for her – she was voiceless and powerless at the time.
As these wounds get more light and air, as more people hear our experiences, as more speak up, as more poetry and art is used to communicate, the more hope there can be. I fully understand how it took 25 years to write that poem.
Indran Amirthanayagam, an author and poet read from his recently published book, Uncivil War, continuing the theme of trauma, displacement, war, and unbelonging. In Fire Department asks displaced refugee peoples from all over the world – Where is your Village Burning even if your home is not in the list. Ready to Move was a poignant ode to those who are witnesses to the only truth worth repeating – ready to move with a toothbrush, a fresh set of clothes. In Father, Indran eloquently mourns his father, moving from speaking of personal loss (watching geese honking on their way tothe other side of the sky, poems to survive the fires, he has left us his name we wear it today) to the theme of universal experiences of the death of a father. Indran moved on to poems of upliftment as he hoped that the world would be inspired by the outcome of the American elections, in spite of something rotten in America, life pressed out of George Floyd, there is still hope he said – ordinary decent Joe has my vote – ending by saying he is an American optimist, and that the next war needs to be one that can unite humanity – saving our planet.
Varsha Saraiya-Shah continued the evening with a reading of I Speak from Towers of Silence in which she likens 6 feet of social distancing as a coffin length apart, observing that babies pop out like flowers, and being moved in different ways by the reality of bodies piling up in refrigerated trucks in New York. In Neither Hope nor Miracle, she speaks of science being necessary, that it needs to be unfenced with countless windows, that climate will throw earthly tantrums, warning, exhorting, and pleading with people to heed science. In When the Wind Blows, Varsha goes back to music, drawing inspiration from Miles Davis, saying, listen to what you can leave out. In Headlines, she playfully alludes to hair at different life stages, bound, unbound, and finally to a time to reshape the wildness even if Broadway will be closed till June 2021.
Saleem Peeradina’s poems submitted for this event were read by Pramila Venkateswararan. In The Body in Question Saleem Peeradina examines the world through striking images of different bodies and their symbolizing the various states of humanity, power and inhumanity –the bud of infancy to maternal bloom, migrating bodies washed ashore, body behind bars in solitary, body in whose soil is grown cotton, cane or tobacco, bodies from which coal is mined, in genocide, counted in numbers. In Song of the Makeover, he embodies the split he experiences as someone who never fits in where he is, always travelling, seeking himself or what appears to be himself through vivid phrases like full circle renewing the past, most at ease in a state of passage, two tongues, over there another face goes by my name, and, whose shadow doubles behind me.
In The View from 70, Saleem Peeradina draws playful and delightful images for us of interlopers who take over our bodies and are finally successful. The interloper enters stealthily withunmarked baggage, practice(s) hit and run arts, is the seducer who played for years on the swings slides and seesaws of my heart, a seventh sense, even with a no-vacancy sign. Finally, he concedes that it is best to befriend them, learn about them and co-exist until they (armed and dangerous) eventually win.
I am so glad I made the time for this new (to me) listening experience. It opened my eyes to a whole new vibrant community of poets and lovers of poetry, as well as those who enjoy hearing about the desi experience that we bring to the world of poetry. It seemed generally agreed upon that there has been more poetry written and made available to people all over the world, and that more people turned to poetry during the pandemic. Whether people had more time, needed poetry to make sense of the world, or whether technology brought poetry to more people, the increased interest has been one of the more welcome outcomes of the pandemic.
Desi Poets
Here are all these people
Who look like me Sound like me
And they read, and they love
Carry their hearts outside
Like me
speak the same languages
Languages
Of love and poetry
Of loss and separation
Of longing and dreams
Old homes and new
Old words renewed
Speak the language
Of Jack fruit, mango piquant as
Cilantro and green Chilis
Chai and samosas, sweet as
Jasmine with Thulasi leaves
Dusty tropical heat
Musty corner memories
Uncles, aunts, cousins
Clammy hands of first loves
Awkward fumbling kisses
Drenching thunderous monsoons
Umbrellas collapse in submission
Veins singing
Gathering with hope
Hearts together
rising in affection
Speaking old tongues in these newer lands
Using our Indlish to praise, protest, love
Finding connection in skin, language, country
Are these new cousins I see here?
Watch the Desi Poetry reading below!
Kalpana Asok is the author of ‘Whose Baby Is It, Anyway? Inside the Indian Heart’ and ‘Everyday Flowers’.
Amanda Gorman’s journey is stellar! Her ability to overcome her slippery speech serves as an excellent example to the multicultural children of America. Bilingual kids often have difficulty enunciating words because they hear their parents, who were brought up in India, pronounce words differently. The pressure to code-switch in order to be understood at home and in school may be challenging. Gorman is an excellent role model for all of us because she makes her words matter and her voice heard.
Now a beautiful 22-year-old ambassador of poetry, Amanda Gorman, raised in West L.A. by a school teacher, struggled with a speech disability. She had difficulty enunciating her “Rrrrrrs”! She faced her challenges head-on. She used the power of the written word to formulate and strengthen her thoughts. She rehearsed with full vigor and powerful poetry gushed out like a wild cataract! She became the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles at 16. At 19, while at Harvard college, she was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate.
FLOTUS, Dr. Jill Biden suggested her name after hearing Amanda Gorman’s spoken word poetry at the Library of Congress. In late December she was shortlisted to perform at the 2021 Presidential inauguration. “America United” was the theme offered by the then-incoming POTUS, Joseph R. Biden. Our nation was reeling under the COVID pandemic, economic disparity, systemic racism, and misinformation.
This call to action resonated with the heart of the young activist poet. She set to work! Gorman crafted inspirational words not to nullify or erase the harsh truths of our nation’s memory but to encourage the country to come together.
“When the day comes we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry, a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace, and the norms and notions of what just is, isn’t always justice. And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it, somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished.”
On the day that Senator Kamala Harris became the first Bi-racial woman to become the Vice President of America, Gorman’s words rang true!
“We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.”
On this historic day of January 20th, 2021, her words echoed in the hearts of millions of Americans.
“We will rise from the sunbaked South, we will rebuild, reconcile, and recover in every known nook of our nation in every corner called our country. Our diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful.“
Gorman gleaned the spoken and written words that tattooed the news, after the horrendous insurrection of 1/6/21 and edited her poem to cry out immortal words:
“When the day comes we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid, the new dawn blooms as we free it, for there is always light if only we’re brave enough to see it, if only we’re brave enough to be it.” How can we forget this day? How can we forget these words? “But while democracy can periodically be delayed, but it can never be permanently defeated.”
Gorman’s first poetry collection including the inauguration poem “The Hill We Climb”, will be published by Viking Books. She has talent. She has fortitude. She has a personality. She may not be Robert Frost or Maya Angelou but she is just 22!
Her beautiful words brought a surge of patriotic emotion to my heart, just like when I hear poems like Vande Mataram by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. I hope she can inspire young writers to walk in her words. It would be an honor to breathe the air she is breathing.
Monita Soni has one foot in Huntsville, Alabama, and the other in her birth home India. Writing is a contemplative practice for her. Monita has published many poems, essays, and two books: My Light Reflections and Flow Through My Heart. You can hear her commentaries on Sundial Writers Corner WLRH 89.3FM.
The 2020 US elections were not just about differing political views. People’s lives were impacted on the basis of their skin color, their gender, their sexuality, or their religion.
It bred uncertainty and fear in people who had been targeted for years.
Human beings should be respected for just that, being human. There is no other clause or addition to that.
Here is a poem dedicated to those that felt weak. Rather than offer a solution of light in the darkness, I offer a hand to hold in it.
Oil painting by Author, Swati Ramaswamy (crashed waves/clouds dissolving)
And my brother who listened to Glen Miller and found his Soul
I came to breathe your air
Eat the salt of your earth
And build great buildings in praise of all you were to me
But you have presented me with your soul-less landscape
Your form-letters your form-experiences and your form-civilization
You have presented me only with people
Whose hearts are lost on your highways
And your abysmal wheels of progress
You have forgotten the helplessness of burning children
In your flash-fire experiences
Of Opulence, TV Westerns and Dow Jones
You only serve to numb me now, America
Till I will also begin to chant
Like a new being whose father is forgotten
‘Think of the starving millions of India
My act of contrition will put another man on the Moon’
One day I will unknowingly be speaking in this strange idiom
And somewhere in the dimming recesses of my memories
A flickering fire will finally die
And I who was so close to starvation and death
Will think only with revulsion and fear
And not sorrow
Of dirt, flies and men
Lying dead from thirst in parched fields
And stop eating candy to save my soul
Sahadev Chirayath wrote this poem in May of 1978 and lives in Buffalo, New York now. He is a Structural Engineer and has spent time with Engineers without Borders in Andhra Pradesh.
This poem was written as a response to the piece Navigating Autism. I was moved by what Swathi Chettipally had written and I thought, “life goes on with all its ebbs and flows, perhaps accentuated at this challenging time, for children with disabilities/differently-abled and those with chronic illness.”
Veiled and Shut
The sing-song of your, ‘mama’ rings in my head
The blithe spirit numbed
Now so lonely in a crowd
No joy gladdens
No fears felt?
These distant eyes
That once spoke
Mystic, shut, veiled
In self-enchanted?
What thoughts repressed
And brilliance locked
What love burned
And pain muted
Oh, lament unsaid…
No tears shed,
No laughter spread…
The sing-song of your, ‘mama’ rings in my head
******
Madhu Raghavan is a pediatrician who enjoys writing, exploring our great outdoors, gardening, and art as a pastime. She is also the artist of the featured image.
Rashmika Manu is a freshman in high school. She enjoys writing poems, playing volleyball, and traveling. She visits India often and has a desire to help the poor and needy in the future.
Kanchan Naik is a junior at The Quarry Lane School in Dublin, CA. Aside from being the Youth Editor at India Currents, she is the Editor-in-Chief of her school’s news-zine The Roar. She is also the Teen Poet Laureate of Pleasanton and uses her role to spread a love of poetry in her community.
Thank you seems so small a word, for no amount of gratitude will ever suffice for all the doctors, the nurses, the first responders, the hospital staff, and to all those who are working so selflessly and tirelessly to save lives. How terribly wrong and ungrateful it will be of us to not listen and not cooperate, and to keep expecting more of their selflessness and sacrifice than what they are already giving. The least we can do, is to stay home with our families, so they can come home to theirs!
Anita R Mohan is a poet and Freelance writer from Fairfax, Virginia.
and so in my entirety, i present the Great Nothing
the product of crumpled wads of paper
of broken poems and meaningless verses
so painfully painless, so perfectly empty
both the Indian and the American in me
have been gorging on Nothing for years
and yet the human in me
still starves
——
Kanchan Naik is a junior at The Quarry Lane School in Dublin, CA. Aside from being the assistant culture editor of India Currents, she is the editor-in-chief of her school’s news-zine The Roar. She is also the Teen Poet Laureate of Pleasanton, and uses her role to spread a love of poetry in her community.
Kanchan Naik is a junior at The Quarry Lane School in Dublin, CA. Aside from being the assistant culture editor of India Currents, she is the editor-in-chief of her school’s news-zine The Roar. She is also the Teen Poet Laureate of Pleasanton, and uses her role to spread a love of poetry in her community.
