Poetry: Asha Biswas

A  Lament for the River

The intermittent sibilance of

The insomniac  sea brooding over the

 Translucence of the morning

Its velvet touch still fresh in his mouth.

 The waves swiftly arrive and the sea

Embraces them in his anguished arms

while the night groans buried in a

shipwreck of shadows of the dead.

 When the river rushed and drowned in the sea

There was no trace of her body, only

 Her desires still float, like spilled blood,

 On the barren sand without any walls.

 ***

The Ashvattha Tree

Ashvattha is that which lives not tomorrow

An apt metaphor for the transience of life-

Nature’s law of creation and destruction.

But the seeds of Ashvatth  never die .

 The roots of Ashvatth are our desires

 That bind us to the wheel of life. The upward going

Branches know the higher realms of consciousness

While those that move downward

Confine the body to the material world.

 The tree makes us gasp at His imagination

Asha Viswas is a former professor of English, Benares Hindu University , Varanasi, India. She has also taught at Aligarh and at the University of Calabar, Nigeria. She is the author of Keki N. Daruwalla: the Poet and Novelist , Tennyson’s Romantic Heritage and Mapping the shore: Exercises in Criticism and has edited The Black Novel and Keki N. Daruwalla: Reviews and Interviews.

She has also published four collections of  poetry and has won the second prize in All India Poetry Competition 2017. She has read her poems in Western Europe, The U.S.A. and African Universities and had a fan club of her poetry in the U.S.A.

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Local 2020 :: Setu, June 2020