Voices Within: Ambika Ananth

Ambika Ananth

Ambika Ananth is a Founder Editor of Muse India, a literary e-journal, who also had served as its Chief Editor, Ambika Ananth is a bi-lingual writer, poet, journalist, reviewer and a translator, who has twelve published works, both in English and Telugu in various genres like poetry, prose, short stories, creative writings.  She is currently the Editor-Poetry of Muse India- www.museindia.com. Her English poetry has appeared in many National and International Anthologies and in ‘Indian Literature’ of Sahitya Akademi. She regularly contributes her articles to the English Daily “Deccan Herald’ and THE HINDU and reviews books for ‘Indian Literature’ and ‘Muse India’. She lives in Bangalore, India and can be reached at  ambika.ananth@gmail.com

Asylum

Bound on all sides
trying to fly to skies
Somewhere to go
A never land?
Dreams stutter
a hubbub
A torn heart
building a nest
in a migrant space
An asylum of chains
A cerebration
Without any sense
Unprepared
Dragged
into an orbit
of nothingness

Age of Kali Purusha

{A ten year old girl-child became a mother recently in the city of Chandigarh after her maternal uncle raped her and impregnated her even before she reached her menarche- this poem is based on that gruesome happening}

You are a tender dream
that’s dashed to the ground
You are a stream of sorrow
dug by the demon in a human
You are a bud beauty
mutilated and crushed brutally
You are now a turbulent picture
filled with angst and fear

Your maternal ‘uncle’
who was supposed to sing
a sweet lullaby and see your smiles
in the bright moon of the night,
very deceptively stole
the very life-light of yours

under that very moonlight
like the eclipse causing
Shadow planet Rahu*

He is a father, to daughters
of your age
Yet he couldn’t see a daughter in you
Blinded by his diabolical lust
He is an animal
breathing only sexual air of incest

Your soft gentle hands
that need to play in pure freedom
have been smeared
with smells of violence and abuse
Those despicable loathsome moments
caused by the act of sexual assault

your hands are collecting those

 and arranging them in heaps

 raising them as summits of tears
as warnings, as memorials
for the society to look at
and feel ashamed

The soulless male fleshy body
of your uncle
violently lodged his feral sperm
in your tender uterus
making you pregnant
even before you attained menarche

You didn’t know the meaning
of your growing belly

you looked at yourself in wonder
Seeing you that way
your family bewailed

pouring from eyes
tears of flames
But had to remain law-bound
bridled by the sacred Veda like Law

not to terminate pregnancy

in the second trimester.

The life that entered you
through your cracked bleeding vagina
emerged out
from the cut of your tender abdomen
through a C section operation

Thus,

you a ten-year-old mother
have taken birth in this world
in this age of kali purusha*

Rahu is a shadowy entity, one that causes eclipses. Rahu represents the ascend of the moon in its processional orbit around the earth. In English Rahu is known as North lunar Node.

Kali Purusha is the reigning lord of Kali yuga when evil and malevolence thrive

Dream Island

The warmth of your breath
on my eyelids
fills an intoxication
that keeps me awake
in every cell of my being
I become a dream island
in the mid ocean of passion
How alluring is your charm
that plays with
my dreamy wakefulness
The pulsations in my pulse
turn rapid to endure
the power of your intimacy
Our love no longer be
in our time
It goes into a riotous horizon
of a fathomlessness seduction
The moment
bereft of any sound
creating musical love notes
of torrential carnal waves
takes me to my nativity
Drenched and shining
like a pearl in an oyster
possessed by love
I feel ensconced
I feel precious
I feel complete

UNDYING

Love even when forgotten
makes noise
from the nooks and corners
of mind and heart
reverberating in the head 

the echoes of the past

A murdering monster
boiling in the blood

The very same face of love
becomes multitudinous specks
of dust in  the eyes
Once that which was the very thread of life
turns into a noose
Once that which was red excitement
turns into sooty blackness
Breathing turns deathly
Like trapped wind in lungs
Like sharp thorns writing a requiem
to the memory of a dead heart
attacked by the bitterness
of lonely love
that turned lonelier
In its failure
undying hatred for love
is a pennant
hoisted high
Death is
an inevitable correlate
of birth
But how to kill love
If it doesn’t leave your mind ?

Vine in spring

Your eternal light

ignited a holy fire in me

burnt the stark dark sins

lighting the path ahead

Your eternal Love

as thousand sunrises

rushed headlong to me

to place me in a

priceless state of

warmth and glow

I fly to brighter horizons

away from the chasing blackness

of past and present

with my healthy new wings

your gift to me…

The quagmire inside

washed away by tears-

rinsed of pollution,

purged of venom,

I pulsate with pure breaths.

The simmering fires

of negative thoughts

are extinguished

from my life

Now I am a human

shrunken to size

of reality and truth

like a vine in spring

I am sprouting

new leaves of life.

Voices Within Complete List of Poets :: Setu, January 2019