By A.K.Ramanujam walking in museums of quartz or the aisles of bookstacks looking at their geometry without curves and the layers of transparency that makes them opaque, dwelling on the yellower vein in the yellow amber or touching a book that has gold on its spine, I think of snakes. Read more…
By A.K.Ramanujam Yet like grandfatherI bathe before the village crow the dry chlorine watermy only Ganges the naked Chicago bulba cousin of the Vedic sun slap soap on my backlike father and thinkin proverbs like meI wipe myself dry with an unwashedSears turkish towel like motherI hear faint morning song Read more…
By A.K.Ramanujam Extracts from the poems (It has 11 stanzas)7 Lord of the twelve right handswhy are we your mirror menwith the two left hands capable only of castingreflections? Lordof faces, find us the facewe lost earlythis morning. 8 Lord of headlines,help us readthe small print. Lord of the sixth Read more…
By A.K.Ramanujam In Madurai,city of temples and poets,who sang of cities and temples,every summera river dries to a tricklein the sand,baring the sand ribs,straw and women’s hairclogging the watergatesat the rusty barsunder the bridges with patchesof repair all over themthe wet stones glistening like sleepycrocodiles, the dry onesshaven water-buffaloes lounging Read more…
By A.K.Ramanujam Extracts of the poem Sky-man in a manholewith astronomy for dream,astrology for nightmare; fat man full of proverbs,the language of lean years,living in square after almanac squareprefiguring the dayof windfall and landslide through a calculusof good hours,clutching at the tear in his birthday shirtas at a holein his Read more…
By Sri Aurobindo To weep because a glorious sun has set Which the next morn shall gild the east again; To mourn that mighty strengths must yield to fate Which by that force a double strength attain; To shrink from pain without whose friendly strife Joy could not be, to Read more…
By Sri Aurobindo A trifling unit in a boundless plan Amidst the enormous insignificance Of the unpeopled cosmos’ fire-whirl dance, Earth, as by accident, engendered man: A creature of his own grey ignorance, A mind half-shadow and half-gleam, a breath That wrestles, captive in a world of death, To live Read more…
By Sri Aurobindo This puppet ego the World-Mother made, This little profiteer of Nature’s works, Her trust in his life-tenancy betrayed, Makes claim on claim, all debt to her he shirks. Each movement of our life our ego fills; Inwoven in each thread of being’s weft, When most we vaunt Read more…
Translated from Urdu to English by Rajagopal Parthsarathy Original poem by Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib To my eye the pleasures of the world are nothing but dust. Except for blood, what else flows in the guts? Turned to dust, the wings are now a spent force;they might even blow away Read more…
By Rajagopal Parthasarathy My tongue in English chains I return, after a generation, to you. I am at the end of my Dravidic tether, hunger for you unassuaged.