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

Poetry: Usha Akella

Usha Akella

 

I TAKE THIS BODY AS AN ORCHARD OF PAIN

(Villanelle)

I take this body as an orchard of pain,

Do not rearrange the stars, recast my lines,

This body I take as my soul’s marked terrain.

Not the bruising betrayal like that of Cain,

These braised branches are storytelling of mine,

I take this folklore as an orchard of pain.

These laboring lungs, butterflies in the rain,

These brittle bones holding high like upright vines,

This body, I take as my soul’s marked terrain.

That which strives in spite of strife do not arraign,

Imperfect symmetry is Nature’s design,

I take this body as an orchard of pain.

These knots’ gnarled circuitry still remains unchained,

I ascend unseen in searing spirals aligned,

This body, I take as my soul’s marked terrain.

In this battered artwork still a divine strain,

As the crystal cup that holds the aging wine,

I take this body as an orchard of pain,

This body, I take as my soul’s marked terrain.

Villanelle: A villanelle is a nineteen-line poetic form consisting of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.

These knots’ gnarled circuitry still remain unchained

I ascend unseen in searing spirals aligned (12s): 

Refers to the concept of the soul’s evolution as a spiral 

***

A SHAKESPEAREAN POSSIBILITY

(Englyn Penfyr) 

Shakespearean possibility met-

Web enthralled with light, lightly

shawls the bramble so barely. 

Exquisite! Quivering strands on fingers

of twigs in a dance. Whose hand 

is this? Can they understand? 

Witness, the alligator oak climbing,

Cloaked face seeming to stoke 

the blue to a crimson cloak. 

Build an Eiffel tower of light, applaud

pure transcendence spider knight!

Watch the twilight weave the night.

Englyn Penfyr: Welsh. ST 

10 S/7S/7S                                                                                                                                                                                              A/A/A                                                                                                                                                                                                   1-3 S after the first line’s main rhyme are echoed in the first few syllables of the second line. Third line only reflects main rhyme.

*** 

I walk and close the door

(Italian Sonnet)

I walk and close the door this night-

A house of heavy dreams and wakeless torture

Delayed courage, delayed joy, delayed valor,

(Now! Shut the coffin, cascade into sight!)

Delayed aloneness, delayed, delayed light,

I take my tattered and true signature,

Kept women in the talons of culture,

Walk someday, walk willingly into night.

I know sour may ferment to sweet again

Reverse the heart, re-sequence the stars,

Refill the scalloped heart of the dove,

Molten fig from a chrysalis of pain,

Some stars are someone’s forgotten scars,

One-crutched glory, go on! Go now! Free Love!

***

Khamboji

(Italian Sonnet: abbaabba cde cde)

Across the river of air, a trembling of sounds,

One voice aged with the secret of song,

Ancient flight of the eagle home-bound.

The receiving voice is a young doe bright-eyed,

New blood, new vistas, new gleam,

The lifting of a new butterfly in flight.

A musical phrase repeats, repeats the ridges of note,

The gently insistence of perfection, the coaxing of a phrase,

Thus pass the rites of affection, the elder the young dotes.

Such sacred gifts are worthier than brilliant gems,

From heart-to-heart the blood’s heirlooms,

The flowing of sap from the trunk to newer stems.

***

Madingley Hall

(Ghazal)

Plop! The road is corked open at the threshold to Madingley,

Goblets of graves raise a manifold toast to the entering at Madingley.

Clouds punting in parks of somber green, somnolent season,

Node, lode, burnished lobe, open the pores of Madingley.

Coral tongues of brick incant green chants in the cold embrace of air,

Aren’t we sold to the ancient currency of leaves in Madingley.

In the ashen cerulean black birds boldly arch their script,

Corridors slough their skin inside the old mind of Madingley.

Weeping willows graciously bow to the black gown of night,

Larvae of accents transit in the moldy air of Madingley.

Coppiced hazel, purple leaf plum, liquid amber, thuya retell stories,

The black walnut is flickers of gold in the setting sun of Madingley.

Inside the harlequin passport of windows, newly stamped visas of faces,

Nascent poets dare cross the old quadrant maddeningly in Madingley.

Ghazal:

Radif: Refrain-Madingley

Matla: First couplet of the ghazal. 

Maqta: Poet uses ‘poet’ as an emblem of self-identification instead of her name in the last couplet.

Beher: line length needs to be constant; not followed in this ghazal. 

Qaafiyaa: Rhyming pattern of words: threshold/manifold/cold/sold/boldly/old/hold/mouldy

***

Bio: Usha Akella has authored ten books that include poetry, and two musical dramas. Her latest poetry book I will not bear you sons, was published by Spinifex, Australia. The Waiting published by India’s Academy of Letters, Sahitya Akademi, Delhi was translated by Elsa Cross in Spanish and published by Mantis Editores, Mexico. She edited and conceived Hum Aiseich Bolte! This is just how we speak, a poetry anthology on the city of Hyderabad released at HLF 2023. A festschrift, A house of words, in honor of Keki Daruwalla is due in 2024 from the Akademi.

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 is widely anthologized, and has been invited to numerous international poetry festivals, and by prestigious venues/hosts such as the Ministry of Arts and Letters, Mexico (2023); House of Lords (2016 organized by Yogesh Patel) etc..

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Setu, January 2025

Book Review: The Waiting, by Usha Akella

The Waiting, by Usha Akella (Sahitya Academy, India, 2019, Pages 45)

Mona Dash

I read this slim collection of poetry fittingly on the plane from the UK to the US. I say fittingly, because the poet lives in America, and some of the poems were written when she was here in the UK.  Secondly the location felt most appropriate– it was silent, most around me were asleep, our plane was somewhere over the Atlantic, over the seas, over clouds, not moored anywhere, and in that space between day and night, moonlight and sunlight, there I was reading The Waiting, unable to tear myself away from the beautiful words gracing the pages.  A sense of floatation   is what this collection inspires.

Love, is at the heart of this interconnected poems, numbered, not named, from 1 – 28. Many are form poetry, sentences decorated across the page.  The love here, is love for the Divine in the form of a Beloved, just like the mystic poets – Bhakti, Sufi, Kabbalah, all these ‘philosophies of rupture, rapture and release’ as mentioned in the foreword by Priya Sarukkai Chabria.

Akella starts the collection, dated 15^th October’ 16, enroute to Cambridge, UK from Austin.

 All around me, people know everything.

 I am an unsaid question

Usha Akella

And this seeking and exploring continues throughout the other poems. She implores, she requests, she demands of the Master.  She says in poem 3:

Do not be the outpost of my heart,

Do not enter,

Do not occupy this house

Don’t hold my hand,

Don’t hold me close,

Don’t be the present

Or the past,

Don’t become my future….

Do not be gentle my Master

Do not melt me hidden fires,

Do not pull the wires like a puppeteer

I am breaking breaking breaking.

Elsewhere she says – Be a wingless cloud –  Colorless rainbow, scentless flower, Die!  This stripping of the ego and a complete offering is what the poems teach. How does one remove everything from the self and offer to the Divine? – ‘Here, I am slain! A heap of straw.’

Then sometimes it is as if the poem sings to the lover, as it seems, where she demands and rightly so, ‘if people are attached to their dogs and cats, why not you to me?’

These poems can be read all together, or on their own, and any way it is done it doesn’t fail to move. When reading a collection, I love to find my favourite story or poem. But it was harder to do it here, since so much of it is so beautiful, so deep.  In poem numbered 19, she says, 

You might say: the earth’s crevice is filled with sky,

This is law,

so, why not I?

Written in a deceptively simple manner, The Waiting is a song, a story, a poem, holding in its heart a rare intensity. Modern poetry is varied, sometimes clever wordsmithery, sometimes clever performances, striking imagery, in all this, The Waiting is a classic piece of poetry, and Akella has bravely experimented with the form and the structure of the poem, to produce this really unique collection.

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Mona Dash is the author of ‘Untamed Heart’ (Tara India Research Press, 2016), two collections of poetry Dawn- Drops (Writer’s Workshop, 2001) A certain way, and very recently, a memoir A Roll of the Dice : a story of loss, love and genetics (Linen Press, UK) She has a Masters in Creative Writing (with distinction) from the London Metropolitan University. Mona was awarded a ‘Poet of excellence’ award in the House of Lords in 2016.  Her work has been published, anthologised and listed in various competitions such as Bath, Bristol, Fish, Leicester Writes, Asian Writer, Momaya Press to name some. Her short story collection Let us look elsewhere was shortlisted for the SI Leeds literary awards ’18.  Mona is also a Telecoms Engineer and MBA and works full time in a global technology organisation.  Originally from India, she lives in London. www.monadash.net

Usha Akella has authored four books of poetry, one chapbook, and scripted/produced one musical drama. Her latest poetry book is published by Sahitya Akademi, India’s highest Literary authority. In 2018 she earned an MSt. in Creative Writing from Cambridge University, UK. She read with a group of eminent South Asian Diaspora poets at the House of Lords in June 2016. Her work has been included in the Harper Collins Anthology of Indian English Poets and included in various anthologies.

She was selected as a 2015 and 2019 Creative Ambassador for the City of Austin, USA. She lives in Austin. She is the founder of ‘Matwaala’ the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the US, and co-directs the festival with Pramila Venkateswaran. 

Setu, October 2019