Five Poems written during #CeWoPoWriMoWE 2021
Spring in Betla
One fine morning , it broke 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
Talking to Narmada – You are different
Ganga Jamuna Saraswati Sindhu Godavari Kaveri All very decorously feminine And then you Nar Mada Androgynous Like your patron Ardhnaareeswara Shiva Krishna Godavari Kaveri All peninsular rivers flow west to east You are the longest river flowing east to west You are different , gloriously different from the norm Flowing in a Rift Valley between Vindhyas and Satpuras River Battered battling boisterous still You give me the courage to be different , stand out from the crowd and defy norms
What is six feet apart?
What is Six Feet Apart To a heart inured To Infinity ? Loved ones gone forever Is just one thing Whole worlds Whole Civilizations torn apart Is quite another One pandemic With endless mutations Vaccines Variations Is one thing The eternal virus of Greed Colonization Systematic loot And Devastation Is quite another But don’t bother The spin masters Will soon have you crooning The tune of the new normal Formal And informal While species vanish Millions die Millions live lives of quiet desperation The earth unravels You will go out to dinner with friends You will watch baseball games in stadiums You will hug your Mum and Dad You’ll buy a new IPad You will rock the vaccine scene And trees, birds and tribals will die unseen Six Feet Apart ! Go on hurting Earth’s Heart Make a song and then sing About each little thing While the World Is vanishing
Those who love
Those who have truly loved Will continue to pray They know only too well There was so much to say
Oceania of joy
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 its 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 is 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
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 and 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, as also in the special edition of the Yugen Quest Review, Issue 1,June ’21.
Yugen Quest Review 