Aug 7, 2019 Uncategorized

Spiral
©August 7th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram

When you spin in a spiral
Who’s to say where it begins
And where it ends?
You could go around almost forever –
A space ship caught at the edge
Of a black hole, forever spinning,
Your molecules getting stretched
Altered, rearranged, redistributed,
So that the you that once was
And the you that are becoming
And the you that will be
Bear no resemblance to each other,
Except that all the molecules
All the atoms, the elements
That comprised you still exist,
Albeit altered and unrecognizable,
As they spin into the heart of a dense, collapsed star.
And who’s to say that you won’t emerge through it
Into another time, another space, another mind, as you,
Shining and incandescent,
Trail wings of flame, as you,
Transparent and dense, a paradox of Self,
Pull and push matter at will,
To form your own, pulsing,
Radiant, clean new Universe?
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Jul 29, 2019 Uncategorized

Chasmic
©July 29th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram

Alone is a word
That opens like a chasm
In space between stars.

Jul 27, 2019 Uncategorized

After Hamlet
©July 27th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram

People leave in twos and threes.
The park-lights catch a few stragglers in a huddle.
The green-room tent collapses
Like a souffle with floppy egg whites,
While we remove poles and pegs.

We can unpeg a play,
Unscrew our emotions,
Uncap our realer selves.
But words seep in, sideways –
And osmotically – now Shakespeare
Is entwined with our DNA.

And who’s to say which self is realer?

We are a summation of all we’ve read,
All we’ve said, all we’ve had said to us,
All we’ve dreamed, all we’ve imagined,
All we’ve sung and spoken,
And seen and done.

Is there a core, or are we like
A constantly roiling Earth,
In flux, rising and folding,
Boiling and churning within,
Even as we cool and harden without?

There are always fault-lines,
And trenches, and places into which
We can get pulled, impelled blindly.
When we emerge, we are always more,
And always less.

Too much thinking, this.
Here is what’s real: Humans re-creating
Fiction from four hundred years ago
Playing with words, with stories,
Playing with our capacity for self-deception.

Back. The night is cool, the play is over,
Laughter blooms in one corner,
Someone rolls up cables,
Someone counts the evening’s haul.
We carry what we can to waiting cars.

We fold up things, quietly fold up our Selves,
Voices tucked away into throats,
Ready to restore Dailyness.
For if we didn’t have the Mundane,
How would we detect the Sublime?

We go from one real Self to another,
The night parts the doorway into Dream,
Where another Self awaits, more real than all else.
I go gratefully into the waiting arms
Of Sleep, perchance to dream.
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Jul 26, 2019 Uncategorized

Jul 26, 2019 Uncategorized

Umbilicus
©July 25th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram

I felt alone today,
Not lonely.
Just singular.
Some days call for chatter,
And others for introspection.
Some days, I am mute –
Not from sadness,
Nor from despair,
Just from a need to keep my mouth closed,
And taste my own tongue.
It’s delicate, my tongue, reminding me
I am a creature of flesh,
And makes me forget
All the weight of thought –
Of forethought and after-thought.
Thought is heavy, even light-as-clouds thought
And I like the mooring of flesh to bones,
The feel of a planet tilting away from me
As I plant my feet on the ground,
The taste of grass in my ah!-nostrils.

But mostly, I just felt silent
All day, today,
Until now.
And I am silent, still, as
I taste my tongue
Folded like a lotus within
The quiet cavern of my mouth,
Unwilling to speak,
Alone, singular, and now,
Lonely – perhaps.
Maybe, it’s the word itself
That pulls me like an umbilicus:
Lonely.
So deep blue, so bottomless,
So beyond the power of language to translate.
I pull on the cord, and climb upwards,
Twining around it, in a humming womb
Waiting to be born.
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Jul 24, 2019 Uncategorized

On Watching Teenagers Perform ‘The Tempest’
©July 24th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram

Magic comes clad in many robes
And sometimes, it slips through invisibly.
The trick is to turn suddenly
And glimpse a light flickering down that unused corridor –
You see dust motes dance, alive, intentional.
Sometimes, it happens at sunset when you stand
Staring dumbstruck at a sky gone mad
While your dog tugs you homeward,
And sometimes, when you stare
Into the eyes of a rabbit in the yard,
And it looks, really looks, at you,
As you croon soft words, signaling no harm.

And sometimes, it happens
When you watch teenagers enact ‘The Tempest’
And hear Prospero speak of the sleep
Which rounds off our little lives
Or hear Caliban grieve over a dream of pleasure and freedom,
And, waking, longs to sleep again.
Magic comes on a unicycle,
When Trinculo enters, does a couple of somersaults, and juggles,
And, with a start of horror,
Chances upon Caliban’s concealed form.
Magic lies in the unlearning of grudge-holding
And the learning of forgiveness.
Magic lies in the brave new world
A man dreamed up four centuries ago,
And spun into a dream as light
As an aerial spirit.
I know I’m part of his dream,
Or perhaps, he’s part of mine.
I am that spirit whom he sets free.
And I blow his ship homew

Jul 23, 2019 Uncategorized

Double Vision
©July 23rd 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram

To see with double-vision
You need to fall headlong onto a pavement,
Or break through prejudice,
Or scroll through Facebook,
Or drive home in slashing rain.
I talk to a man sitting outside a CVS, a man
Who smiles, though you see his heartbreak,
When he tells you he’s Indian,
And a beggar – in Massachusetts!
The exclamation breaks through his words
And hangs, astounded, in the air.
His passport’s expired, he has no work.
There’s more history there,
But I’m a stranger, and it’s late,
So we speak, warmly, in Hindi.
He asks me if I have money.
I have none, and I tell him so, ruefully,
All bought with a card, I say,
Pointing to my bag of First Aid things.
No matter.
The conversation holds currency for him and me.
I ask him if he needs food, which I can give.
He says, ” I’m okay.”
So I bid him goodnight,
Tell him to take care.
We part, smiling.
Two humans, two Indians,
One hurrying home to comfort,
The other contemplating a world
That’s held together with safety pins
Outside the CVS in Porter Square.

The world’s precarious.
I wish I could set it right.
I drive home.
Double vision sometimes blinds.
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Jul 23, 2019 Uncategorized

Intersecting Planes
©July 23rd, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram

All the planes lie open
And to move from one to another
Is to move from one fractured cubist realm
To another.
A series of still-shots in staccato movements,
And all this stop-motion scenery splinters
Before sitting upright.

Thus it was, and thus it is now,
But the fractures have resolved into windowpanes
And the view outside is
Alight with the sun,
And I could be anywhere out there,
Dancing,
Unfettered,
Full of air,
Full of Song.
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Jul 18, 2019 Uncategorized

Hum (We)
©July 18th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram

Clouds of hatred gather:
A congregation of locusts in a blind lust
For plunder and destruction.

What matters it if they themselves starve
After they eat all the crops?
Nobody hinted at intelligence in them.

And what can we do?
Wring our hands?
Wrong our hands?

We could blow smoke up
To where they gather.
We could confuse them,
Scatter them, drive them off
Shrieking in dismay.

Better still, we could
Find the right resonant frequency
And sing them into sanity.

All together, in one, deep,
Collective Hum:
I Am.
You Are.
Let us Be.
Go back. Be at peace. Subside.
There’s food enough.
The apocalypse is not yet
Nor will you be the Drivers.

Together, we will find your humanness,
Hum the soft note our planet
Sings as she swings
Across a hostile orbit
In a cold Universe.
Hum out the anger.
Hum out the hatred.
Hum out the toxic waste-gas
Of your fear.

There’s room enough and food enough.
Get down on your knees
And hum upwards in love:
All together, in one, deep,
Collective Hum:
I Am.
You Are.
We Are
Let us Be.
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Jul 16, 2019 Uncategorized