Mar 26, 2026 THE BLOG
Greeting the Ghosts:
(First posted on my WordPress blog on Feb. 10, 2013)
©Vijaya Sundaram
Every morning, when I wake up, and every night when I go to sleep, I greet my ghosts.
They cluster around me, aching with loneliness. “Tell us about it all,” they sigh and await the news of a world they crave.
They never got used to being dead, you see.
I take pity on them sometimes. They are so very sad
Still, I ask myself, Is this all there is to it? Shouldn’t they be floating higher and higher, and eventually get sucked into the vortex of the sun?
I don’t tell them what I think. Their feelings might get hurt. One of them, a tender-hearted spirit stays long by my bedside, asking me all about my sleep. I lead it into my dream world, and it takes in a deep breath. The other ghosts, jealous and fretful, pull it back into their world. The tender-hearted spirit weeps. The windows rattle outside.
I turn over. I need to sleep. Morning awaits me, fresh-eyed and abrupt, like a child waiting to roust one from one’s rest.
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Mar 26, 2026 THE STORIES
Perfugium
©July 21st, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram
“What is that, Sire?” clicked Secondus.
Primus, squinting through the periscope at the watery world around them, clicked out a reply.
They’d been stranded in the trenches of the ocean world. Air supplies had diminished, as the plants in their craft died. They’d risen to the surface just in time.
Their craft bobbed shoreward. The water fell away; the drowned land rose into view with no sign of life.
A colossal figure holding its torch loomed.
Primus quailed within. “They must have been giants!” he clicked.
They discerned some writing below – an alien script.
No matter; they’d finally found refuge.
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Mar 26, 2026 THE STORIES
Photograph by Vijaya Sundaram, Fall 2025
Titanic Emergence
©July 9th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
No one noticed the clouds that day, because people had been forewarned.
The alarm had sounded all over the globe — even the indigenous peoples in forests and hills and distant islands had been informed. Nobody ventured out.
When the clouds parted, a beam of light shot through and sucked up the entire planet.
Where the Earth was taken, no one knew. People’s eyes were shut tight, and they felt … translated.
Later, in a newly formed Universe, a new race emerged. Twelve people straightened up. Their heads brushed the edges of space.
“Let it begin again,” said Time.
And it did.
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Mar 26, 2026 THE POETRY
Monastic Illuminations
(An ekphrastic poem about the illuminations in manuscripts produced by monks in the Middle Ages)
©April 24th, 2017
By Vijaya Sundaram
Snails and horses, sex and darts
And armored men with enlarged parts
And women with distended hares
Extended branches, full of snares.
All jokes aside, are these sad hearts?
Devoted to their prayer-books,
Deprived of hugs and loving looks,
These monks, lacking another’s love
Are raised, instead, to worlds above.
Are these, then, thoughts they cannot brook?
Or, do they thrive on scenes like these,
While singing psalms on bended knees,
Laughing with well-disguiséd mirth,
At things that cannot live on earth,
But which they gaze upon with glee?
Were they the precursors of crazed
Apocalyptic painters, dazed
With visions of another world,
Where those from paradise were hurled,
And found themselves down here, amazed?
Warrior snails and valiant knights
Flatulent and naked, sights
As one would never want to see
When thinking thoughts of piety
Enough of this, out with the lights!
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