Apr 10, 2015 Original Poetry
Waiting to be Found
©April 10, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
I see you, intent, focused
On shadows and light,
And I see your eyes move
As you follow fantasies
On flat, hollow surfaces,
Made and sold everywhere
For you.
And I wish I could
Blow away the cobwebs
In your mind
And open windows
And fling open doors
And sweep out the floors
For you!
I feel for you,
Ensconced in darkness
Playing with shadows,
Imagining you’re happy
With games and candy,
Perhaps thinking
What’s out there?
Out there are stars,
And sky, and clouds
And birds, and trees
And flowers and bees,
Waiting to be found.
And angles and angels,
Archetypes and archangels
And anarchy and autarchy
And humanity and divinity
Waiting to be found.
And songs and poems,
And inventions and theories
Dreams and prophesies,
And a wildly spinning earth,
All waiting to be found.
One day, there will be you,
Held aloft by loose string,
Looking for all of this,
For a way out of all that,
Waiting.
Mar 31, 2015 Original Poetry
Hum-Ant
© March 31st, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
Gaea awakens from a troubled dream.
Ants crawl over her sleeping, aging
Rocks, her streams and plumes of
Buried hair and abused bones,
Like carbon unredeemed.
Hum-ants, building anthills everywhere
Tickle, bite, pluck, rip,
Carry on war and kill for fun,
And maim her trees, and
Muddy her waters, and choke her air.
The Titans do her bidding again.
Happy to serve her, they stir
Restlessly, they arise, full
To the gorge with vengeful
Intent, with billennia of pain.
Churning the waters above, blind,
They groan, and grind plate
Against continental plate.
Stretching, yearning, shoving
Landmasses aside, they grind.
All will be changed, all.
Run, for the waters WILL rise,
Or learn to swim.
Run, for the unforgiving sea
Will swarm over our cities
And swallow our cries.
All will be changed, all.
Run, and as you run,
Sing to the crying sky
And the grinding earth.
Sing of your history
As you follow the sun.
All will be changed, all.
Sing the song of innocence
And the songs of knowledge.
Sing the praises of your mother
And forgive the hurtful words
You uttered, and made no sense.
All will be changed, all.
Sing of stirring into being
And careening into death,
Eyes wide, stretched
Wide to accommodate
Light-years of stars, still unseeing.
All will be changed, all.
Sing of hope, of all the shoulds
Of ambivalence and despair,
Of words understood and
Of words misunderstood.
All will be changed, all.
Sing of forests felled for highways
And buildings arrogantly
Reaching for the sky, crushing
Life out of sidewalks, die-ways.
All will be changed, all.
Sing now.
Or learn to fly,
And take off before
That final tidal wave
Envelops us all.
Or, better still, let the storm
Transform our cry.
All will be changed, all.
Disintegrating into atoms,
We shall be simple matter
Once again, a part of
Earth and Stars,
Blown from the palm of
A Titan’s hand, phantoms.
All will be changed, all.
Like stardust, we will blow
Into the void that waits,
We hum-ants will know,
At that final moment,
That from humus we come
And to humus we will go,
For that is what becomes of us.
Human we are, humble, humus.
All will be changed, all.
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Tags: #Gaia, #Original Poetry by Vijaya Sundaram, Climate Change, Gaea, Hum-Ant
Jan 24, 2015 Original Poetry
Snow Fall
©January 24th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
White drifts down,
A reminder that
The world will be renewed.
And that hills and trees,
Stripped of color
Are still beautiful.
And this white and brown
And black world, so gentle
So muted, so tender
Obscures the memory of
A harsher place waiting outside
The edges of window frames.
Suit up and take
My Eager Doggess for a walk.
And now, these are my reality:
A snuffly nose,
A waggling tail,
A smiling dog —
Forget all else, just
Skid and slip
On sidewalks down steep
Slopes in my up-and-down
Neighborhood, shaped
By an erratic earth epochs ago.
And think of fifty-year old bones
Breaking and cracking on
Empty streets, dragged
Down by dog in haste,
Yell to her urgently: Slow down!
She does, befuddled.
Turn resolutely back,
Find a safer, straighter,
Quicker way home.
No broken bones,
No bruises or bumps.
Strangely, after all is over,
Reflect, drinking hot tea, that
Moments of sheer terror
Carry their own pleasure.
But don’t risk all for it.
Do not fall.
Falling is for the young.
There is a slight pang,
The memory of a deep gong within me.
Shrug, move on,
Falling is for the young, I say firmly.
Look out my windows,
Glad to be home.
Let my gaze caress the sky,
And the earth hums
With quiet satisfaction,
While she laps at her water
Noisy, unselfconscious.
It’s good to be still vertical
In a snow-veiled world.
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Tags: #Original Poetry by Vijaya Sundaram, #Winter, 2015, Chronicles of Holly, Snowfall, Walk with dog
Jan 16, 2015 Original Poetry
Air and You, and I
©January 16th, 2015
By Vijaya Sundaram
A bird flies
An arrow in the air
Shot from a twanging earth
Into an indifferent sky,
Exulting in flight.
Slicing the air,
Smiting the blue,
It flies, heedless of
Its effect on me, the Watcher,
Its wings flap, unsteady,
And then even out
Steady as sails in the wind
On an ocean that calls me,
But still terrifies.
And the air which turns to wind
Descends and snakes around my skin.
The same air the bird sliced in two
Touches me,
And then, you.
So, we stand, in different lands,
Our skin tingling with mystery,
Linked by a bird which
Slices the air,
Displaces it,
Spills it, and moves on.
Will we, if we meet,
Know each other?
Will we, when we meet,
Say, It was you to each other?
Will we shake hands
Or fight?
Will we hug each other,
Or smite first?
All this air, going round and round
And round and round,
And round and round,
An endlessly rotating earth
Has touched you, and you
And you, and you.
We breathe in each other’s air,
Our ancestors’ air.
We sigh out air and cry out air.
We sing air, and bring air,
We plummet in air,
Climb summits in air.
We eat bursts of air
In water, when we drown,
And heat air when
Our planes rise up.
You are my brother, my sister,
My father, my mother,
My friend, my lover,
My self, my other.
Why such strife,
Then?
Come, let us share
This lovely air.
And this bird, winging back down,
Come, bird, alight on my arm,
Thank you for spilling
All this beautiful, sunlit
Song-lit, space-lit
Air!
Thank you for letting me dream
Thank you for that song that streams
Down, and down, around us.
Thank you for rising up
And winging
And singing
And wheeling
And reeling in
All this air!
For today, I was sad.
And I didn’t see you,
Not exactly.
I just made you appear
In my head, and there you were,
Real, solidly soaring
Slicing into the air.
And you brought me relief
And you brought me peace
And you made me cut the knot
That held me down.
I know there are more knots.
But right now, breathing
In and out, quietly,
Surrounded by voices
Ephemeral as you,
I imagine you, O Bird,
And you, O Person,
On the shores of
A faraway land,
Smiling at the sun,
Breathing our air.
And around me,
On me, from feet
To head,
The air tingles
On the skin
I’m in, floating
In a bubble of air
In the emptiness
Of space.
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Tags: #Connectedness, #Original Poetry by Vijaya Sundaram, Air and You, and I
Nov 15, 2014 Original Poetry
Full Fathom Five
© November 15th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
Tiredness rIses, a wave
That washes bones
Which float,
Then sink,
Bleached yellow by time
And sun, and a life
Run by clocks
Whose ticking, asynchronous
And arrhythmic,
Tocks away the hours;
And a life run
By the whims
Of others, whose
Lives are run
By the whims
Of others.
And mothers, and fathers,
And sisters and brothers
And friends, and enemies,
And people unknown.
Float in and out our porous
Bones, adding, subtracting
Calcifying and ossifying.
And the bones
Swirl and sink
SIng and drop
Down, down, down
Into the heart
Of the sea,
And they sing all the while,
Until we seize up, and stop.
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Tags: #Original Poetry by Vijaya Sundaram, Reference to The Tempest, Shakespearean reference
Oct 6, 2014 Original Poetry
Out of Water and Out of Air
©October 6th, 2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
The fish sails,
Head half in, half out,
Floundering, diving,
Coming up again, diving
Neither in, nor out,
Neither here nor there.
Suffocating in air,
Drowning in water.
Tail lashing back and forth,
It sees the golden disk
Of sun from below,
Comes up eagerly
To drink in the light,
But gasps, as the rare
Air hits unaccustomed gills.
Writhing in terror
And ecstasy, before
It sinks back in,
Singing of the light.
And unformed lungs
Struggle to grow
In a body too light, too
Easily pierced by bait.
Surrounded by fish
Which flow easily, like song,
Through that twilit world,
At ease with body and fins
Unconscious and joyous
Twirling in sport,
Racing away in terror:
Prey chased by predators
Chased in their turn, it
Swims on and on, raises
Face to the light, sinks back in.
Is that all there is to this?
This constant striving
To no avail, for no purpose?
This struggle, this wriggle
Through murk, and to lurk
In dark spaces, with waving
Fronds that invite, but bite.
Is this all there is?
Don’t tell the fish
That struggle ennobles.
There is nothing noble in it,
Except in the minds
Of those who would weave words
To lead the blind.
Where is a world for a
Fish such as this?
Struggling at the confluence
Of air and earth and water,
It makes a bubble-dream.
Where is a world for a
A fish such as this?
It twists and leaps
And looks up skywards,
And dies, it dies, full
Of desire and pain.
And when it dies,
Will a new Creature emerge,
Straddling air and land and water,
Poised and cool,
Master of all it surveys?
Or will the creature
Look around, and yearn
And weep for something
We cannot yet see?
Neither land, nor sky
Nor water nor fire
Will quench its yearning.
And so, it goes.
While the air and sky,
And land and water,
Swirl darkly, promising
Nothing.
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Tags: #Fish, #Original Poetry by Vijaya Sundaram, #Striving, #Struggle, Evolution, not belonging, not in one's element
Sep 30, 2014 Original Poetry
A Sleep-Prayer for My Daughter*
©September 30th,2014
By Vijaya Sundaram
Blue descending, silken-deep
Like midnight promising her sleep
Darkness, spilling sweet moonlight,
Ease her mind with gentle night.
Let her sleep, and let her dream
Let her visions palely gleam
In quiet streams, in forest glades
In hollows where no one has strayed
Hold her sweetly in your arms,
Oh Sleep and Night, and bring no harm.
Let her smile in sleep, and think
No thoughts of death. And let her drink
From wells of fun, of play and song
Show her where she might belong.
Then, float her boat of happiness
On moonlit streams with no distress
That brook of dreams where she
Will sing, and read, and quietly be.
For childhood’s full of dreams and fears
Give her strength and spare her tears.
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Tags: #Daughter, #Love, #Original Poetry by Vijaya Sundaram, Dreams and visions, Happiness and peace, Prayer for My Daughter