Poetry: Jayanthi Manoj

Jayanthi Manoj

Ecosphere

Borderless,

The mind is an ecosphere

of words and silence.

 

A quantum of the self,

A photon of thought.

 

A hydrosphere of vaporizing feelings

Steaming with rewound hurts

or hazy happy smiles.

A sublimation of intuition.

 

Sometimes a fractal of creation and growth

Other seasons, a valley of the lost

Meandering the terrains of shadows.

 

The mind, a tectonic plate

Shifting, realigning, restoring

With the heat of the moment to pass and process

Beneath the crust of the face

And façade of the self.

 

The mind

forever expands and shrinks

In its space

The one it generates and vacates.

***

 

 

Words Matter

 

What you say to the mind, matters

It festers or heals

What it is or it was

Meant to be.

***

 

I am.   I am more than the spaces I hold,  More than the family that I am centered in, More than the work that I pinned to, More than the dishes I make and do not, More than the labels I hold and detest, More than the power I release and withhold, More than the failures I face and bounce forward with, More than what you can see and what I am willing to let you see, More than what I am for and grey out to be.    I am the endless sky, limitless air, boundless water, unbounded fire, the immense earth.  ***     Voices and Whispers   I am still searching for my voice and many a time I hear it.    Sometimes subtle, other times deep Many a time in others’ voices and here and now I've felt the loss of it too.    Now and then it's spontaneous like running water At time a live wire like fiery humour Fewer moments I'm compelled to mimic the best,  Potpourri and make it a trail of dry nuts.   But whenever it whispers in that deep stillness,  when the words drum the clipped strings of the soul within -is the voice born.   Noisy first and then finds rest in a poem.  ***

Jayanthi Manoj is a widely anthologized Indian English Poet. She has an anthology of poems titled 'Sketches: From the pages of my diary'. She is an Assistant Professor of English, teacher-mentor, life-skills trainer and Vice Principal, from Holy Cross College, Tiruchirappalli, Tamilnadu, India. She loves colours, words, silence and speaks the voices of whispers. She has a youtube channel ‘Voices and Whispers’.

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