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.

4 comments :

  1. I hope you remember me from our time in Calabar. I have never forgotten you. Barry

    ReplyDelete
  2. I would love to hear the poems read by the author. I met her about 40 years ago in Calabar. Unforgettable. Barry Bryan

    ReplyDelete
  3. MayI request Asha Biswas's email please

    ReplyDelete
  4. Barry Bryan's email address is a.b.bryan@btinternet.com

    ReplyDelete

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