Anju Kishore (Diaspora Dual Identities)

Anju Kishore

A Foreign Accent

Appa’s Gulmohar stands

an elderly guard

gnarled, yet of girth, wide

as if justifying the decades past

Its crown canopies the little house just behind

Dare I touch the trunk that I knew once as a stalk

or sit lightly on the buttress root

that now runs alongside the old compound wall

A Doberman from the house bounds up barking 

as I linger outside the gate

A stranger looks up from my childhood porch 

that wears a not-so-old coat of paint

I am a trespasser now on the house appa built

Quickly, I gather its present form into my mind

to look later for the window

that waited for a vendor's jingling cart

or for the postman with magic in his bag

For now

I spare the Gulmohar its questions, and walk away 

from the times that life had left behind

The twilight presses closer to me

with the urgency of chowmein joints

and the blazing store-fronts of American brands

Soon, stars will appear, not over a dark, solitary terrace

but in the tall columns of tightly packed apartments

I look for the undulating mounds of red earth

crowned with pebbles over which a girl

skipped and slipped on her way to a distant school

The shrubby meadows are gone too

Restaurants now play host

where cattle were once let loose

Yet

from the familiar curve of a road 

to that small shrine now squeezed by traffic 

a faraway voice drifts up to me

It's the old soul of the new city calling out by name

the girl, whom the decades 

have only outwardly changed

Anju Kishore is a Pushcart (Poetry) Prize 2022 and 2024 nominee, a Touchstone Award 2023 longlister, and an award-winning editor of numerous free-verse anthologies. She is the author of ‘…and I Stop to Listen’ (2018) and ‘My Conversations with God, Life, and Death’ (2025). Her poems are part of several anthologies like Aatish 2, The Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2022 and 2023(Hawakal and Pippa Rann Books, UK respectively), and Late-blooming Cherries 2024 (Haiku Poetry from India, Harper Collins) to name a few. She has dabbled in online theatre and is currently exploring Japanese forms of poetry.

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Setu, April 2025

ANJU KISHORE, INDIA

Anju Kishore

Ms. Anju Kishore, formerly a finance professional, is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a published poet writing in English, and an award-winning editor of numerous free-verse anthologies. She is now learning the ropes of theatre and Japanese forms of poetry. Her book of poems, ‘…and I Stop to Listen’ (2018) inspired by the civil war in Syria was well received. Her poems, some of them prize-winners, have been part of many anthologies and journals.

SOULSPEAK

Meet me beyond thoughts that dart

like fishes frantic to be everywhere

Beyond conversations

knocking into the edges of nowhere

Meet me there, where a shaft of dawn

is not broken by what should

or should not be done

There, where clouds do not claim 

mouthfuls of every horizon

Come, let us hold hands

not as love's convoluted threads

but like waves adrift

bound by an ocean's depths

And when it is time to step back into shadows

waiting to draw you into their designs

we shall let the dark filigree drape your curves

for ablaze within you would be

the intent of a million suns

contoured by all the grey that we freed

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Solitude of Soul 2023 :: Setu, March 2023

The Mahatma in Us

Anju Kishore

Barbs, fire and stones fling verses

Non-alliterative, non-rhyming, un-metered

For stark needs be the attack, to counter harsh fact.

Words drip blood to spread

Blaze upon blaze, stirring cauldrons of hate

Peace is a pipe dream, love-a lost cause

Both to be sloganeered dead before the poem's end

If change be the manifesto of powerful pens

Let spill the seeds of blood-less revolutions

Urge to unearth that forgotten tool of non-violence

For it takes greatness to wield restraint in oppression's face.

For that greatness, do we await a towering  lead

Or in every tyrannised mind, that within, shall we seek?

The flame that dances in our core, decide for its brilliance

To burn in annihilation or illumine the path to solutions.

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Setu Special 2020 :: Setu, October 2020

Book Review: ONLY IN DARKNESS CAN YOU SEE THE STARS

Review by: Anju Kishore

ONLY IN DARKNESS CAN YOU SEE THE STARS

Author: Santosh Bakaya

Genre: Biography
Publisher: Vitasta Publishing Pvt Ltd
Year of Publication: 2019
ISBN: 978-93-86473-62-2
Pages: 285
Price: ₹ 495

On 3^rd April 1968, a day before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr had proclaimed passionately, prophetically to an adoring crowd, two-thousand strong:

‘I have seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you but I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.’

The Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee had reverberated with a dream that stormy evening, a dream that a single gunshot seemed to shatter the very next evening.

Forty years later, Barack Obama went on to create history by becoming America’s first African-American President in January 2009.

Santosh Bakaya

Santosh Bakaya, in her biography of Martin Luther King Jr, Only in Darkness Can you See the Stars, walks us down the incredible life and the daunting times of the preacher, writer, scholar and charismatic leader of the burgeoning civil rights movement in the United States of the 1950s and 60s. This “indefatigable crusader” who challenged the interracial inequalities of America with the power of non-violence even in the face of brutal assault and stiff opposition, continues to be a towering symbol of the blacks’ struggle for equality. Generously sprinkled with relevant and interesting photographs from his life, the book, with its crisp narrative, is a well-researched chronicle of his eventful life. It is also a sensitive study of King, the human being, with all his fears, insecurities and doubts.

Her portrayal of his frailties along with his strengths will warm her readers to this great man who was not born with an impenetrable armour and a shiny sword but was made with the power of his faith in the cause he lived for and was prepared to die for. By the end of his unfairly short life, he had risen from being a civil rights activist to a champion for world peace and human rights.

Anju Kishore

The writer regales the reader with a cheerful account of his happy childhood cocooned in familial love, that set the tone for his belief in the power of “honesty, discipline, diligence, courtesy and patience”. Brought up in a family of pastors, ‘you are as good as anybody’ was his father’s lesson that he grew up learning. Beginning with King’s childhood brushes with segregation that left a deep impression on his mind, Bakaya keeps the pages turning with her detailing of the major demonstrations he spearheaded and the marches he led, the instances of civil disobedience and the filling of jails he planned, to draw publicity to the blacks’ struggle for desegregation and integration of American society.

Her elaboration of how the ideals of this exceptional young man were shaped through interactions with great scholars and thinkers throughout his higher education in Sociology, Theology and Personalism gives us an idea of the rich groundwork on which he based his later non-violent crusades against social inequality and injustice.

Today’s youth would be familiar with King’s iconic speech, ‘I have a Dream...’ at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C. in 1963 that galvanised the entire black community into stirring the mighty United States out of its complacency. For them, and for the generations of the future, this book is an education.

Readers of Indian origin would connect instantly to his reiteration, ‘I am tired of violence...and I am not going to let my oppressor dictate to me what method I must use…we have a power…a power that cannot be found in bullets and guns.’ His belief in the power of non-violence was indeed strengthened by his month-long "pilgrimage" to India in 1959 along with his wife Coretta and friend Lawrence Reddick, which "left an indelible impression on their minds, imbibing them with the spirit of Gandhi, which would greatly influence them in the years to come.” To this trip, Bakaya has thoughtfully dedicated an entire chapter, replete with many photographs and King’s India itinerary.

This powerfully oratorical preacher with the heart of a warrior and the sensibilities of a poet, termed his receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 "as a recognition of non-violence as an answer to the crucial political and moral question of the time and the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence".

Santosh Bakaya, writer, teacher, Ted speaker and herself a Gandhian in thought has to her credit, The Ballad of Bapu, an acclaimed poetic biography of Mahatma Gandhi. Only in Darkness Can you See the Stars is a logical continuance of the author’s intent to “remind a young India that looks askance at non-violence, what a struggle America waged to give itself equal rights including sitting rights and voting rights…King’s life is an example of what is doable at the time of utter darkness”. Beginning the book dramatically with King’s assassination and ending it with the same, but on a sorrowful note, she skilfully leads us to his powerful message to the world— a message of peace, love and brotherhood that continues to be relevant today in a world stricken by strife and divided by its inequalities:

‘Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilisations are written the pathetic words “too late”. We still have a choice today; non-violent coexistence or violent co-annihilation’.

She signs off this biography of historical significance and moral awakening with an evocative wish, wrung from her heart—"This hate-filled world would once again echo with his rumbling eloquence and persuasive conviction, beseeching it to put an end to ‘revenge, aggression and retaliation’, making place for the reign of love, for never were we more deeply ‘in need of a new way, beyond the darkness that seems so close around us’.

“It is the crying need of the hour to rededicate ourselves, as King wanted so many years back, to the struggle for a new world, bursting with love, compassion, sincerity, non-violence, harmony and peace”.

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Anju Kishore 

I am a poet, editor and a former Cost Accountant. My poems have been featured in numerous national and international journals and anthologies. One of the winners of The Great Indian Poetry Award 2018 and The Prime International Poetry Prize 2020, my book of poems ‘… and I Stop to Listen’ was published in 2018. I have been part of the editorial teams of four anthologies with India Poetry Circle and Kavya-Adisakrit Publishing.

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Setu, September 2020

Anju Kishore, INDIA

Exclusive: Best of Women Poetry: Edited by Padmaja Iyengar-Paddy

Anju Kishore

I…

...am the deepest of the oceanic deep

Swallowing the storms that failed to breathe.

Thoughts upon thoughts have I pressed

On to its throbbing, silent bed.

There are times when I rock the sea's chest

Tossing ships with my tempests.

Times too when I let you deep into my generous depths

And empty myself of my selfless wealth.

Some nights I am the tide that leaps

Restively towards an unattainable moon.

Other days find me contentedly

Lapping the shore like idle dreams.

I dare to sing and sigh, dance and roar

With equal passion, on different notes.

I throb with life or brood like death

Who knows what currents I have in store!

I...

...am a woman with the heart of an ocean.

Or am I the ocean folded into a woman?

Listen to the song that plays in my alleyways,

Tell me if you do not hear it in the waves.

The music with which my silences beat,

Isn’t it the one of the oceanic deep?  

Anju Kishore, poet, editor and a former Cost Accountant, is a recipient of The Prime International Poetry Prize 2020, for her maiden poetry collection ‘…and I Stop to Listen’

(2018) that was also one of the winners of The Great Indian Poetry Award 2018. Her poems have been featured in several e-zines, magazines and poetry anthologies, and have won numerous online poetry contests as well.  Anju is a part of the Editorial Team of India Poetry Circle that has launched two anthologies in 2019. She is also a Senior Editor at Pinkishe, the print and e-zine of the Delhi based NGO, Pinkishe Foundation.

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Best of Women Poetry -2020 :: Setu, March 2020

Anju Kishore, INDIA

Anju Kishore

WOMAN  OF SUBSTANCE

Like the dawn you descended
With the sun in your eyes,
Escorted by departing moonbeams
That set up a welcome birdsong
In the background of an early breeze.

You arrived like the summer rains
On an exhausted, expectant earth
To draw from her thorny, stony chest
The hidden, tender sprouts of green
And release the nectar from her breast.

You have raged red like forest fires
And flowed fearlessly like silvery streams.
Standing steadfast like mighty mountains
You have kept cold-hearted miseries in check
And fixed a stern eye on trespassing intentions.

You are the sky that smiles demurely through a starry veil
When the night tiptoes in to make you his bride
Tossing another cog into the wheel of time
To the rhythmic rumble of which dances life,
Life that seeds, bleeds, screams, to arrive.

Also the earth and water, fire and air
The womb, the blood, the heart, the breath.
Every noun there is, is you and none else.
Verbs and adjectives scatter at your doorstep
Like flowers at the feet of the resplendent goddess.

Rise and burn the binds of biased rules and barbed words
That bid to belittle and blight your flight beyond the skies.
Raise yourself to be unfettered of mind, beautiful of soul.
For it is you who will one day soon shape the world
A world now wrecked by men and swallowed whole.

WARRIOR WOMAN

You have hidden storms in your eyes 
While quakes have shuddered in your chest.
You have carried such gales in your breath
Under the pretence of breathing
And hushed that which shattered
Like glass behind your lips.

The world squatted on your shoulders

Clasping and turning your head
This way and that so all you saw
Were harried lights and hurried blurs.

It slapped your ears repeatedly
So what you heard was something

Like a desert wind chopped to pieces
And flung into the frenzy of a city.

The silent scream and the breath
Had consoled each other.
The ears and eyes had made peace,
With what had gone unheard, unseen.

The world slithered down your spine
Sending shivers through your cells.
It gripped, vice-like the elbows and knees
Making moving and living debatable things.

They have names for such and other afflictions
That are triggered when the world
Free that it is, clambers all over you.
And then they market therapies and happiness too!

But you have learnt to rein in the unbridled world
And reclaim yourself from its hooves,
Release the shatters and the screams
To regain the space for your dreams.

Daring to redefine dogmatic definitions
You tore down the walls and burst through the ceiling
Of your pigeonhole that confined you to suit society,
A society that makes, breaks or reshapes everything to its fancy.

You set your sight right on what it was you wanted,
Grabbed the reins, swung the whip, spurred the stallion forward.
You regretted not your daring, doubted not your purpose.
The horizon was far, the path hot and arduous
But you leapt across the chasms, raising dust with your speed
And arrived with the flourish of a victorious warrior on his steed.

AN EVENING RAIN

She came to meet me
Like an old friend
Flying over the rooftops
To drizzle on my face.

I stood there with my fingers
Outstretched, soaking in her sprinkle
And listening to her whispers
For she had a lot to say.

A wicked wind had pursued her
Aided by the sun that shone
Through some fickle clouds
To scatter her and scare her away.

I looked away to hide a smile
For she showered petulantly
On my window, wetting the curtains
With her indignant spray.

She drummed on my roof
As if to catch my eye again.
I saw her stomping towards the trees
That had dared to snigger at her rage.

I would want her to calm down
And murmur some more to me
Of the world beyond my window
And the many goings on there.

But the sky now looks subdued
The wind is vanquished too.
The world has stopped in its tracks
While she poured, steady and brave.

I turn away from my window
For she is no more just a friend.
Like the free spirit of a fearless woman,
She is the liberating evening rain.

Anju Kishore, a Cost Accountant by profession and a homemaker by choice, turned into a poet, seeing the startling images of the Syrian civil war. Horror and anguish at the death, destruction and the plight of innocent children caught in the crossfire between warring adults formed the subject of her early poems. Soaking in the challenges and pleasures of moving across countries, she traced her poetic journey from war to the love of the universe in her first book of poetry '...and I Stop to Listen’ that was published in April 2018. One of the winners of the Great Indian Poetry Award 2018, her poems have been featured in a foreign magazine, adapted into a theatrical performance and are part of e-zines and upcoming anthologies.

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Women, Power & Creativity :: Setu, March 2019