Apr 28, 2019 Original Poetry, Uncategorized
Sea-Spun
©April 28th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
Sea-glass, driftwood, seaweed, spume,
Sea-shells, mussels, jellies bloom.
Sunlight, moonlight, glints out-bid
By algae, jellyfish, sea-worms, squid –
Fill her human eyes with longing.
Make her dream of sea-belonging
Though her sea-arms aren’t quick,
Though her feet can’t seem to kick,
Though the deeps fill her with fear
Though the distance tempts her near,
Still, she watches from the cliff, and
Stills her heart, approaches, stands,
Far away, a whale-song brings her
To the brink. She sings an answer.
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Apr 27, 2019 Original Poetry, Uncategorized
Stillness
©April 27th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
Lying on snow, or on a stone floor
Looking up through glass, or through air,
I see everything shining like a voice
In a cathedral, or atop a mountain.
I hear the heartbeat of Earth,
And I am stilled into awe.
The sky bends and cups my face.
I could die happy, thus.
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Apr 25, 2019 Original Poetry, Uncategorized
The Seduction of the Eternal Now
©April 25th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
Every minute passes, and with it
The memory of a moment of joy
And of sorrow for its passing.
To live in constant yearning,
And looking backward at all
That has been, helps me –
When I look at a flower and know
It will fade fast away,
And know that young beauty of spring
Will become tired autumn,
And see my hands, and know
They will become old.
Too much knowledge is
As dangerous as too little,
And I wish I didn’t know
With every cell in my body
That entropy is inevitable,
That it is in the order of things.
I would that I could
Sing my days away in eternal
Spring, leave thinking behind.
The eternal present seduces me –
I could bear stasis, this moment,
With music coming from the other room,
The hum of electricity in the air,
The knowledge that I can still move
With freedom, clarity, pride.
To do nothing holds a kind of pleasure.
And yet, and yet, I rush
Headlong into the next thing.
The suspense of living
Is like a surfeit of sweets,
And I want to meet Death halfway,
Rising from the table,
With a smile and an invitation
To sit down and join me.
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Apr 16, 2019 Original Poetry, Uncategorized
Learning to Evolve
©April 16th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
You drown again, then emerge,
Delphinine, into the air,
Twisting and turning,
And sleep eludes you, you think,
But you dream, and dream, and dream,
Until the waking is a dream of waking,
And the dreaming a dream of waking.
And you walk on water, towards a distant shore
Where sylphs gather in the air, and dryads
Behind trees, and salamanders dancing
In flames that do not scorch, cool fire!
And they await you, Undine,
As you come closer, closer.
You reject the world of waking.
It is dull, plastic, a mere imitation,
Where you’ve loved, and lost,
And regained everything and everyone
A hundred times over.
You laugh, as the waves part beneath your
Extremities, which you cannot see,
Because you never look down, just up,
Just around, because there’s so much to see,
But, as you approach land,
The droplets flying off your slick, silken skin,
You wonder, briefly, about the element
From which you came, and,
Fighting the impulse not to do so,
You look down.
Below, you see all the faces of all
Whom you left behind, all who loved you,
Or were indifferent to you, or hated you,
Or whom you didn’t even know,
And even as you catch their startled
Fearful faces gazing up at you
Emerging from their world,
Poised to escape, to desert them,
The waters start rising upwards,
Until you find yourself sinking, sinking.
Waving to the dryads, the sylphs,
The salamanders, you let out a loud
Gasp, before you drown,
Once again in the world beneath.
Awake now, you find yourself
In the clutch of dry land,
Dry as hate, dry as death.
And you suck in a lungful
And learn to evolve.
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Apr 15, 2019 Original Poetry, Uncategorized
Spring Walk
©April 15th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
Forsythia brightens into yellow
And the grey air dances around it,
Like a sylph enraptured by matter.
The dog’s ears blow back
As we walk into the windy day.
It’s this simple:
You, and you, and I, and
Our sweet cloud-grey dog
Hold back the ravages of time
In singular moments.
It is this which I shall imprint
Into the clayey reaches of my mind
As the years pile on each other
And time with cruel fingers
Plucks away our memories.
At the end, when all is gone,
These will remain – these,
And other moments held in
Words, held in emotions,
Held in images held in
Words held in emotions held in
Images, while rain falls
Steadily, steadily down
Drawing a curtain over it all.
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Apr 14, 2019 Original Poetry, Uncategorized
Into
©April 14th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
To see into the heart of things
Is to be burned by the sun.
And yet, and yet,
What if you cannot help it?
What if the sun pulls you
Ever onward, ever upward,
Until your wings, scorched,
Crackling with flame, blackened
Beyond repair, fall downwards,
As you ascend, despairing,
Not knowing whether that still point
Just before you fall,
Is the point that you reach
Into that heart, and pluck
It, and fling it far, far away?
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Mar 10, 2019 Original Poetry
All the Birds, One Bird
©March 10th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
All the birds rose up together
Out of the snow,
Frantic and fervent, they rushed upwards
In a white panic, snow flying all around.
Disturbed from dreams of
Who knew what?
Warmth, brooding warmth on beaches,
Perhaps, or becoming pelicans,
Or, better still, standing in a pink flock
On one leg, squawking up a storm
Stinking up a miasma in togetherness,
Or, perhaps, just becoming one with snow.
Who knows?
The birds arose as one bird,
Out of deep, deep snow on a field,
And I saw in their wings
My constant, constant yearning,
As I rose, within, with them, struggling
Against gravity, against everything
That could hold me down.
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Mar 10, 2019 Original Poetry
A Dream of Watches and Clocks
©March 10th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
All the watches were glowing
All the clocks struck one together
No mice ran up them
A cat ran down one.
Blood on clock-face.
Mouse-tail hanging down,
Swinging back and forth,
Back and forth,
While Foucault’s Pendulum
Swung the earth
Round and round
Round and round.
A dream that never ended,
While the galaxy spiralled away
Into infinite nothingness.
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Mar 9, 2019 Original Poetry
Falling
©March 9th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
Gold-light glances off a window
Falls in slivers onto snow,
Breaks icicles off the roof
Into silver spears that fall,
Straight as a descending cry,
Fall onto the ground,
And stay there, a reminder.
Of what?
I don’t really know.
Things link up with things,
Chains of gold, chains of ice,
And add up to a long
Unbroken feeling,
A feeling of falling,
Down, down, down.
Add up to a feeling.
Of what?
Everything flows through my blood,
Everything falls headlong through
The long, deep space within,
Like a dream, or a song, or lust,
Or love.
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Mar 3, 2019 Original Poetry
Passing
©March 3rd, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
Everything passes, even this feeling,
Everything passes, and I mourn it all,
In the impermanence there is immanence,
And when they pass – all things, all loves, all lives,
I mourn them all, and the Godhead in them.
I mourn backwards through time.
All the things I remember, and all I don’t:
The whistle-lollipops on which I, a child,
Would suck with a relish I cannot recapture,
The enormous trees up which I shinnied,
Agile as a monkey, or an imp, in childhood,
The green tamarinds I ate, sour and succulent,
Hanging off branches in Pune’s woods,
So mysterious, so alluring to a child,
Who never wanted to read or write,
Just play, and live in make-believe all day long.
I mourn backwards through time.
The passing of my school days,
That I valued my life so little that
I cannot remember much of it,
Only the sensory world in which I swam.
And those things I do remember,
Fill me with a spiky regret:
Sharp winter air in Pune when I was seven,
The slipping of sunlight and rain
Over polished mango leaves,
The songs on All India Radio,
The world of books into which I plunged
After my first reluctance and rejection of them,
My mother’s fragrant foods which were a fact of life,
Like love, or joy, or goats on the street,
Or bird-song, or jasmine flowers at my window.
I mourn backwards through time.
But these days, I also mourn these:
The stores that close down,
Billboards which would stare down
At me while I paid them no heed,
Now gone, given way to unbearable gloss,
The decor in banks I used to visit,
Now so clinical and perfect
Like mannequins with no skin pores.
I mourn lost bookstores
In Arlington,
Or Harvard Square,
Or Porter Square,
Or Davis Square,
Or Medford Square.
I mourn the missing street performers,
Jugglers and puppeteers,
Story-tellers and singers,
We’re all gone now.
I mourn the minutes, hours, days, years
Of my life, the lives of those I love,
The lives of those whom I have not yet met,
The lives of all the creatures vanishing
Before I shall ever meet them.
Everything passes through me,
And through you – and somewhere,
We’ll meet, you and I, you with your
Memories, I with mine,
And we will let them flow through us,
And beyond, until all fades away.
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