New Address

I am now writing @

https://gangulisumana60.wordpress.com/

my new blog address :)

My Parents

Courtesy: Poets United

When you two fought

you never knew

how I burnt

in your wrath.

I was a water body,

too brine to taste.

But the Kal-boishakhi* days

were a sweet breeze to me.

For both of you sang together

those familiar songs

of our dear poet.

Though I dare say

your voices

were song-worthy at all.

yet each note bloomed

in my heart.

I still carry their fragrance.

*Violent thunderstorms in the Gangetic plains of India are locally known as Kal-Baisakhi or Nor'westers occurring from March till Monsoon establishes over North-East India: Wikipedia

Posted for Susan’s Midweek Motif ~ Parents, Guardians, Significant Adults in the Lives of Children @ Poets United

Scent

source

I smell darkness

in the bloody dawn

when tooth and nail

of man hunters* glint.

Their whispers

reek of gargantuan carcasses

numbing my nostrils.

Are the rose blooming days

a distant dream?

                 

*Recent Assembly election in my State saw atrocities to rig polls by the ruling party who left no stone unturned to resort to this violence. However in most cases the police and military came to the rescue and people could vote though shooting and murders could not be averted.

Posted for Sanaa’s Prompt Nights – Nothing is more memorable than Scent @ A Dash Of Sunny
&
Shared with Poetry Pantry @ Poets United

Home of Memories

source

I have left my heart

In Pahalgam*

Lidder’s** wild songs

Have stolen my soul

I cached my dreams

In pine forest

On the mountain slope

I let myself

Be Beauty struck

In this fantasy land

Where every drop of life

Is sculpted from Charm

They eddy in the mind

I’ve brought them home

Where I have been living

With memories alone

 

 

*a popular tourist destination in Kashmir

**a river in Kashmir

 

Posted for Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Home

Words

source

It has been almost three years that I have built a home. Truly my heart belongs here. I could not have dreamt of such a dwelling place had I lived a hundred years ago. My enchanting portal takes me above cloud nine whenever I wish. Happiness is at my beck and call. It is no Arabian tale but truth. Believe me; I see your smiling faces by my wondrous windows every day. How can I forget how my chilly grieving bones received the suns you gifted in the dark nights and stopped fragmenting? With an ear tuned to your music, with an eye set to the word-fountain in your heart, I reside. So do you! Don’t you? This solitary abode of mine vibrates with your presence. What about yours? It’s good that we live on words. Our home is words. Our world is words. We are words. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In the end there will be the Word too.

 

My bare boughs

Bathe in your sundrops

Shoots sprouting

 

Posted for Haibun Monday #11: Reach Out @ dVerse

I Took You For Granted

Source

I never imagined

One day you would be

A part of my yearning heart

Little sparrow

Even you carried song

In your pulsating throat

Even you!

And I was deaf and blind

To You

Those man-made iron giants*

Have killed you

Scared you away

Hope you will never go the dodo way

Hope you will never turn into words

To be read only

Never to be awakened

I pray to dawn

To send me this feathery ball of life

To sing and dance

As they did

Only a few days ago

 

 

*Mobile Towers. Radiation from these is being blamed for vanishing sparrows into thin air: Times of India.

 

Posted for Hannah’s hosting Transforming with Nature’s Wonders @ RealToads

 

Spring

In between glum sky

And dewy eyed, listless Earth

My tulip dreams spread

Grief is the shadowy hill

The sole silent onlooker

 

Posted for Sanaa’s Prompt Nights ~ Spring is the time of land’s awakening [11] @ A Dash Of Sunny

&

Shared with Poetry Pantry @ Poets United

Citizenship

courtesy: google image

Is

The infinite canopy of responsibility

Under which

We home

Branch out

Love

Play with freedom

And at last

Die

In peace

Posted for Susan’s Midweek Motif ~ Citizenship @ Poet’s United

Pilgrimage

Source

The breathtaking Trikuta* Mountain top

Embracing the Vaishno Devi shrine

Watched me

As an equestrian

Slowly but surely

Climbing up

Moonlight shawl all over

Singing with other pilgrims

Walking, riding or in palanquins

In praise of the Mother

The breathtaking Trikuta Mountain top

Embracing the Vaishno Devi shrine

Waited with bated breath

For me and others

To cover those uphill serpentine 14 km pathway

Sloughing off the material self

Being prayer itself

To offer our prayers

To Mother Vaishno Devi

And return safely

 

Which we did

 

*Trikuta is located in Jammu, which is one of the three administrative divisions within Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost State in India. Trikuta, the triple peak, is where the holy shrine of Vaishno Devi can be found. More than 10 million pilgrims visit this shrine every year: Wikipedia

Me, at the hotel after whole-night-walking

 

 

Posted for Poetry Pantry #296 @ Poets United

Sigh

Courtesy: Google Image

Do you remember

The thirty year old young man*

Whom you called ‘Cyclonic Monk’?

To whom you said “We’ve come to you

As we would go to Jesus”

He told you, “If only I could set you free like Him”

Do you remember

The thirty year old young man

Whose love flowed in the words

“My sisters and brothers of America”

And you flowed towards him

For the sake of a touch of his godly hands

Do you remember

The thirty year old young man

Whose words deluged America

It was one 11^th September, 1893

At Parliament of Religions in Chicago

It was you who said, “He is Strength and Love personified”

Ah, mark the date

9/11

Love bloomed then

An epoch making nineties

Of the Nineteenth Century

Sigh…………………………………

*Swami Vivekananda

Posted for Susan’s Midweek motif ~ Ninety / The Nineties @ Poets United
&
Shared with Open Link Night # 169 @ dVerse

Extremes

source

You live in the extreme

When you live without darkness

Yet beauty envelops knowledge

And you yearn for escapades

Courting chaos

Like Helen did

You live in the extreme

When you live without light

Until knowledge illumines

So that you can feel a word

Even the abstract ones

By a simple touch

Like Helen did

 

source

Posted for Kerry’s hosting Flash 55 Plus! @ Real Toads

This Poem is an Artist, a Rainbow, a Forest

source

This poem is a color happy Artist

This poem is a rainbow born from a seed

This poem is a forest of fairy tale trees

source

This poem is an abstract art

A canvas with crazy hues

Each color vying with the other

To dazzle and hypnotize you

The invisible brush in Her hand

Paints with strokes and splatters

To make you marvel at Her mastery

This poem is a color happy Artist

source

This poem is Eucalyptus deglupta

Birthed from cracking a seed

It races towards the sky in no time

It yearns to touch its love hidden there

While its bark peels like paint

It morphs into a solid rainbow itself

With strong roots well grounded

This poem is a rainbow born from a seed

source

This poem is a spectacular forest

An almost impossible treescape

Of living and scintillating rainbows

One might mistake it for Eden

Though there’s no fruit for Adam or Eve

But the dreams of others grow unhindered

And reality stands on the threshold of dream

This poem is a forest of fairy tale trees

source

This poem is a tale of Nature as an abstract artist

This poem is a ground born rainbow dreaming high

This poem is a dream of a forest of fairy tale trees

[This is my attempt at Hannah Gosselin’sBoomerang Metaphors]

                                                           

Posted for Sanaa’s Prompt Nights – When besotted with Green [8]

&

Shared with Poetry Pantry @ Poets United

My Flower

source

A flower was offered to me,

It was the spirit of beauty

With its petals of innocence

It whispered in fragrance

To forget it never

As it won’t last forever

When the scented days were spent

I realized what My flower meant

 

 

Posted for Poets United Midweek Motif ~ A Flower Was Offered To Me

Politics

Source

Lots of plots

To coil and clot

Toil hard

Not to spoil

No need to guard

The slot of lips

Lisp

Slop words

Over the tongue edge

Lop off truth

That MiGhT

Be the TrUmp card

Solicit supPort

Stop not

Till the top is reached

Politics Tick

 

Posted for Sunday Mini-Challenge: FASHION ME YOUR WORDS ~ Pierrot Granade hosted by Gillena @ Real Toads

Take me to the Ocean

Courtesy: A Dash of Sunny

 

Once upon a time

I took my soul

To seaside

The lonely shore

Lay quietly

In the fading night

We sat there

Face to face

Wordless

All on a sudden

My soul stretched its hand

Plucked the pink pulsating sun

From dawn

“It’s God’s heart.

Keep it inside you” said my soul

“I will scoop a handful of stars

From the night sky

And the evening breeze too” It continued

But…for what?

“They are keepsakes. Don’t let them out.

Except if they want to come out on their own”

They were indeed

A very different sunrise

And evening breeze

And unusually twinkling stars

They live in me

Occasionally they come out

As words

 

 

Posted for Sanaa’s Picture Prompt ~ Take me to the Ocean [7] @ Prompt Nights

&

Sharing it with Poetry Pantry @ Poets United

Martyr

source

How much greater the world would be

If there were no cause for martyrdom

Humans in power are a different race

Their insatiably flaming hunting spree

Makes truth seekers their big game

From Socrates to Jeanne d’Arc

To Bhagat Singh to Martin Luther King

The chase curiously involves all colors

 

Now the Eye is on the most coveted trophy

This blithe, buoyant, warbling Earth

All songs will stop and fire will rage

Love with glass stare will be in cage

Before the specters will hang the precious prize

There won’t ever be another “human sunrise”

 

The quote is from Alice Walker’s poem ~ Our Martyr

 

Posted for Susan’s Midweek Motif ~ Martyrdom / Witness @ Poets United

Bubble

photo by de jackson

 

The dancing bubbly lips

Are in constant hurry

They often forget to fill

The words with soul

The light phrases float

Enjoy their moment’s stay

Die leaving an air of sigh

Words that birth

From mighty pen

Are nuggets of gold

To live forever

This is inspired by the Tibetan proverb "Words are mere bubbles of water; deeds are drops of gold."

Posted for dVerse Quadrille 3 the word to play with is Bubble

Draupadi*

Source

Whoever thought

That a fire born dusky beauty

Would have such grace, dignity, love

Encased in heart

It was natural for her to wield power

But how well she knew

When not to use it

Her pearl teeth, lightning smile,

Blue lotus fragrance

Kindled fire in many a heart

Her father wanted a son

Of sacrificial fire

To avenge his fury

Her father had not asked for her

Yet along with her brother

Draupadi stepped out of the flaming petals

Born in full bloomed youth

Panchali, daughter of the king of Panchal

She became

Her father had locked her

In a strange marriage

With five brothers

By fate, truly, by kismet

Five exiled princes they were

Five valiant youths

Five consorts!

But happiness was at the beck and call

Of her champak petal fingers

She breathed trust and harmony

She was the sky
To her beloveds

Exiled life with the sun, moon, stars and forest ended

With the kingdom, returned, layered evils

She reduced her foes to ashes

But not before she paid the price

Of being violated in court

Being disrobed while her consorts sat

Hanging their heads in shame

Having lost the power to speak up

Having seen her all five sons slain

Through the passage of

A bloody war among kith and kin

Though she was the stormy inspiration

To her husbands in the battlefields

She always kept the flame of forbearance,

Self esteem, forgiveness, compassion

Bright in the dark hours

She still lives in the breath of Nirbhaya**

In all corners of the Earth

 

 

*Draupadi is described as the Tritagonist in the epic The Mahabharata. According to the epic she is the fire born daughter of Drupada the king of Panchal and also became the common wife of the five Pandavas. Wikipedia

 

**meaning fearless girl, also referring to the paramedical student in Delhi who was gang raped and later succumbed to her injuries in spite of her brave fights.

 

Posted for Sanaa’s prompt Myth @ A Dash Of Sunny

&

Sharing it with Poetry Pantry #290 @ Poets United

Marriage

Source

In the morning

To drink a steaming cup of love together

During the day

To be the rock in the sun and storms hand in hand

In the twilight hours

To see in each other’s eyes of the starlit dream on the night shore

 

Posted for Susan’s Midweek Motif ~ Marriage @ Poets United

32 sq. ft.

My Shrine

This space of a room

On the second floor

With a wooden door

Opening to a terrace

And with a small glass window

An entry way

To a strip of the blue sky

Waits for me

Every dawn and dusk

I know

               

My deities dwell there

They are my family members

Cutest of them is my baby Gopala*

I bathe him

Feed him

Dress him

Daily

As incense sticks spill fragrance

I take my seat on the asana**cross legged

With eyes closed

 

The shrine showers silence to the mind

Stopping slithering thoughts

To rare hood

Their fading fangs

Make room

For the Name of God

The Name***calms me down

I wait for the deity

To step on my lotus heart

This room is my refuge…….

 

 

My Gopala

 

*Gopala is the baby form of Lord Krishna. Since it’s a baby it needs to be taken care of just as a baby in the family

**asana is the mat for praying

***The Hindus practice Japa which is a spiritual discipline involving the meditative repetition of a mantra or name of a divine power. Wikipedia.

 

Posted for dVerse Poetics - Room With or Without a View