Usha Akella (Diaspora Dual Identities)

Usha Akella

Curtains

 

Swaying palm trees on a soaked sunset, 

the crackles of mango yellow, mehandi green, and 

sindoor red match the green and orange dhuri from IKEA,

this imitation batik may be a template of our life—

how our strange imprint is pressed upon a foreign fabric.

We put them up one evening;

measured a hemline of two inches,

spread out two yards and began to pleat

using pins to stay the pleats, in the end

the palm trees didn’t line up on either side

and we collapsed laughing, the wasted material

grimacing on the floor like an out of place tourist.

How ashamed my mother would be

to see me pin folds instead of sew them,

my mother who sews curtains with dainty stitches

in a perfect line and pleats her frustration in large folds,

and my father the safety pin who holds her emptiness in place.

And I pleat my life in poems— these drapes swaying on pages.

 

 

Lemon Basil

 

How close you hold her pressing her into your side,

leg against leg—she isn’t your wife.

I wondered about that one,

 

and how you spilled your books like a schoolboy

while I sat stoic and sipped tea

in a buttoned-up jacket of rust (covered like a nun.)

 

(Your dog lay at my feet bewitched,

the cat glided by, I was uncertain

what to do with the dog’s devotion.)

 

It matched the flaming bushes out there,

You plucked a leaf, held it against my sleeve

and said, “Almost.”

 

We walked through the herb garden

and forests painting the sky yellow,

I stumbled. You caught my arm. Pressed it.

 

I did not ignite. The house was the color of my dreams.

For weeks the world smelt of the lemon basil

crumpled into a notebook.

 

Later, the poems completed what I could not,

Almost. Love must be conjured up when it is not.

 

 

Russian Rain In White Plains

 

I pause at the sweetness of the image

of a man stretched out on a narrow bed alone

listening to the rain lonely for his country.

 

I think of a man who has the time to listen to the rain,

whose poems’ ears are cocked always for Death’s footsteps.

 

I imagine him writing his poems of rain and loneliness,

his handwriting proud as a horse’s gallop,

in a pair of jeans washed out as Spring’s first sky.

 

At a desk whose wood I do not know I see him rise,

step out, take a walk, his maples over his head,

by now my poem is beginning to stretch out beside his,

and I now at home in the forest of his words.

 

 

Usha Akella has authored ten books that include poetry, and two musical dramas with publishers such as Spinifex Press, Australia, Sahitya Akademi (India’s Academy of Letters), and Mantis Editores, Mexico. She was a finalist for Austin’s Poet Laureate in 2025.

She earned an MSt. in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge, UK. She is the founder of Matwaala (www.matwaala.com), launched to increase the visibility of South Asian poets, and www.the-pov.com, a website of curated interviews. She was selected as one of the Creative Ambassadors for the city of Austin in 2019 & 2015. She has been hosted by numerous international poetry festivals, and laudable venues such as the Ministry of Arts and Letters, Mexico, Sahitya Akademi, JLF Houston etc., She edited and conceived Hum Aiseich Bolte! This is just how we speak, a poetry anthology on the city of Hyderabad, and a festschrift, A house of words, in honor of Keki Daruwalla published by the Sahitya Akademi.

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Setu, April 2025