Oceania Of Joy
#CeWoPoWriMoWE'21, Prompt - How Darkness Can Be Light
Well, Paul Gauguin can tell us As also Margaret Mead Claude Levi - Strauss the zealous If only we try to read What the Oceania of Joy is How lives the Natural Man How poor Capital as a ploy is How miserable it’s plan It’s not that Man doesn’t know How to make the darkness, light It’s just that money has taught him How to kill , and maim , and fight The first Rule in Non Violence The second one is Compassion The third is to value Silence And to listen in humble fashion But the overarching value Is that of counting worth By what a man means to you And not his money or birth
The Ring Of Remembrance
CeWoPoWriMoWE, Week 2, Day 7 - Oceans. Prompt - The Ring of Remembrance (Inspired by the poem 'Acqua Alta' by Meena Alexander)
Themselves tortured by Man’s violence Routine callous pollution and nuclear tests The Oceans try to form a blue ring of remembrance Around the Green Earth’s ragged brown breasts O Man ! O Worst of Nature’s Offspring, Worse than all beasts, slavering with greed ! You give to the Earth only cursed offering And ravage from her much more than you need One day the Primordial Ring of Remembrance Will undo you and your unsightly works You forget that you are here on sufferance None survives here who duty shirks You not only shirk but you boast and smirk Your ill-gotten gold will be your undoing You’ve proved yourself a rogue and a jerk Be assured your race will soon be going
Frazil
#CeWoPoWriMoWe'21, Week 2 - Oceans/Forests - Real/Imagined/Dreamt/Experienced. Prompt - Frazil. Inspired by Menka Shivdasani's poetry collection "Frazil'.
O Woe to the wicked Wealth Gnome That says you’re lithe and agile When you leave your roots, your home When in fact you’re most fragile Like Frazil beneath the dark waves Of turbulent waters growing That takes men to their graves It’s lethal seeds is sowing Old Ice from the Polar Caps Is melting at breakneck speed Big Money lays its traps Mankind is enmeshed in greed When all that we need is Love Contentment and Compassion Politics is hand in glove With Greed to create distraction Old Life on the Land Pastoral Generation after generation Though mortal the frame corporal Gave the race a stable connotation Man was made for small communities Large families with room for all Man was not made for big cities Or for spending his life in a Mall How many city people can handle Frazil, or slush or nilas ? Our divorce from Nature’s a scandal We don’t touch the soil , trees and grass What we need to survive is Love An instinct that comes from Nature It doesn’t just descend from above But is taught by Nature’s nurture From the gutters of greed and grasping Let’s escape to the Ocean of Peace The Ways of our ancestors clasping Who had built paths of lasting ease Let’s return to our rivers and mountains Let’s return to our old family homes For these are Love’s true fountains Not cities’ smoky domes Let’s return to the Farm and the Forest Experience Waldeinsamkeit Let’s gasp from a ship’s Crow’s Nest At the Starlit Ocean at night Let’s reclaim from Demons of Lucre Pristine Earth that’s our birthright Let’s wake up from Falsehood’s stupor And walk into Truth’s bright Light
Spring In Betla
#CeWoPoWriMoWe'21, Week 2 - Forests - Real/Imagined/Dreamt/Experienced. Prompt - Restless Leaves
One fine morning , it breaks out Throughout the Forest The Fire of Spring The Flame of the Forest Tongues licking the Sky A Living Thing With wild abandon Trees, young and old, Are blossoming This way and that Restless New Leaves They fling The Flirtatious Breeze Rustles through them all Dancing , laughing
Storm Rising
#CeWoPoWriMoWe'21, Week3 - Rivers - Real/Imagined/Dreamt/Experienced. Prompt - Storm Rising (This is inspired by Lata Mangeshkar's song : Vadal Vara Sutala Ga | वदल वारा सुटला गा |)
Far down the grey reaches of the foaming river The dark rain-laden clouds are rolling in The deep green leaves of the forests shiver Amazing speed yet seems the storm’s strolling in Upon the back of frothy waves, grey clouds Cirrus to cumulus morph and are scrolling in Ominous as ghost sightings of ash shrouds Menacing in the texture of growl sounds The rumbling thunder rolls in woolly mist sounds Sudden as lightning then the monsoon pounds The storm breaks like a pack of hunting hounds
Magic
#CeWoPoWriMoWE'21, Week 2 - Forests, Prompt - Magic
Forests of Magic In pages of books Tall talking trees Bright babbling brooks Pale purple mountains Leafy gold glades Cascades and fountains Indigo shades There dwell the Witches Wizards and Elves There sit Old Gnomes Talking to themselves There live some Monsters Ogres and Djinns There swim Gold Fish With bright silver fins There you’ll find Alice And Red Riding Hood And Gingerbread Houses For children who’re good There lives Snow White And there dwells Rose Red And now I am nodding It’s time for bed
O’ Flow Again, Mighty Ganga
#CeWoPoWriMoWE'21, Week 3- Rivers, Prompt - Why Do You Flow, O Ganga ! (Inspired by Bhupen Hazarika's song 'O Ganga, Tumi Boichho Kaeno?)
A Civilizational Era Is but a wave In the Ocean of Infinity Yet to us mortals Products of the Indo- Gangetic Civilization Ancient among the World’s River Valley Civilizations The Mighty Indus The Sacred Ganges Are Mothers, Primordial Goddesses And as over Civilization Over-ripened , teeming , decaying Unravels , who can we turn to ? We turn to our Mother Rivers And to them address our complaints As if we ourselves had not choked them Polluted them , strangled them , sullied them Killed them by overuse , destroyed their sources Bedammed and bedamned their ancient paths to the Ocean Guilty of Matricide Guilty as Sin We yet seek to displace our guilt on those we murder Half a century ago the Bard of Assam , land of the mighty Brahmaputra Son of the Creator Brahma cried “ Why do you flow, O Ganga ? “ A Cri de Coeur , asking why the Mother River Did not halt its flow on hearing the cries of oppressed masses From both its banks, protesting evils oppression and injustice Hunger and poverty and unscrupulous wielding of power Incensed the Poet and his cry was to halt the Mother River in her tracks Today, she has halted almost completely Today, if Bhupen Hazarika were standing with me in Patna In a hot dusty luu- tortured April , He would lament in the words of an older bard, twisted “ Where the clear stream of reason has lost its way In the dreary desert sands of dead habit “ Yes, today, mind is not without fear nor the head held high Today neither Ganga nor knowledge is free Today not only has the world been broken into narrow domestic walls They have encroached upon and desecrated most of the river bed too Where tireless striving stretches its greedy claws towards more and more profit Into that Hell of Unfreedom have we drifted Drugged , opiated , hypnotised by Unreason The bedraggled reedbeds, the ravaged mango groves The dirt - choked riverbed, the narrow side streams reduced to gutters The tear - inducing ruins of what was once the Mighty Ganga Looking towards them from the rooftops of the ironically named Gangatowers And Rajnigandha Apartments And the rotten corruption that now prevails in the old Gandhian Sadaquat Ashram The Darkness of Ignorance and bigotry in Rajendra Smriti and Gandhi’s Bihar Vidyapeeth The Bard would not have roared like a spoilt child , “ Why do you flow, Ganga ? “ He would have wept like an orphaned child and entreated “ Come back , and flow full and free again , O Mother Ganga ! Forgive us , your errant children , and save our dying Civilization Stop those who riddle your breast with dynamite , Mighty Father Himalaya ! “ For we are guilty of truly Himalayan Blunders And our Civilization has been facing an existential crisis for decades now And is now in its death throes . Yet we are blind , deaf and mute
Amita Paul is by profession a retired bureaucrat but at heart a poet and a teacher. She writes , mostly poetry, in English, Urdu, Hindi and Punjabi. Her recent poems are featured or are forthcoming in anthologies and journals and have found a place of honour in many an online poetry writing forum this summer. She was awarded the NISSIM International Poetry Award (First Prize) for 2019, for Excellence in Writing and her contribution to Indian English Poetry especially through a new genre called Tapestry Poems, by the jury of The Significant League , a Creative Writing group on Facebook. On 22 January 2020 , the TSL Jury announced the award of the First Reuel Prize for 2020 for Non – Fiction to her for her Experimental Prose plus Multi – Media Anthology , ‘ The Saaqi Chronicles’. Destiny Poets, Wakefield, UK declared her Poet of the Year ’20, and also Critic of the Year ’20. Her poem View From A Porthole, was acclaimed at the National Poetry Writing Month site. A selection of her poems feature in an anthology Impressions & Expressions edited by Amita Sanghvi, July ’21..
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