BLOOD BY KAMALA DAS

BLOOD BY KAMALA DAS

One of the greatest literary figures in Malayalam, Kamala Das was born in the year 1934 in Punnayurkulum, in South Malabar, Kerala. Her work, in poetry and in prose, has given her a permanent place in modern Malayalam literature as well as in Indian writing in English. She is best known for her feminist writings and focus on womanhood. She has been the recipient of such famous awards as the Poetry Award for the Asian PEN Anthology, the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for the best collection of short stories in Malayalam, and the Chaman Lal Award for fearless journalism.

When we were children

My brother and I

And always playing on the sands

Drawing birds and animals

Our great-grandmother said one day,

You see this house of ours

Now three hundred years old,

It’s falling to little bits

Before our very eyes

The walls are cracked and torn

And moistened by the rains,

The tiles have fallen here and there

The windows whine and groan

And every night

The rats come out of the holes

And scamper past our doors.

The snake-shrine is dark with weeds

And all the snake-gods in the shrine

Have lichen on their hoods.

O it hurts me she cried,

Wiping a reddened eye

For I love this house, it hurts me much

To watch it die.

When I grow old, I said,

And very very rich

I shall rebuild the fallen walls

And make new this ancient house.

My great-grandmother

Touched my cheeks and smiled.

She was really simple.

Fed on God for years

All her feasts were monotonous

For the only dish was always God

And the rest mere condiments.

She told us how she rode her elephant

When she was ten or eleven

Every Monday without fail

To the Siva shrine

And back to home again

And, told us of the jewel box

And the brocade from the north

And the perfumes and the oils

And the sandal for her breasts

And her marriage to a prince

Who loved her deeply for a lovely short year

And died of fever, in her arms

She told us

That we had the oldest blood

My brother and she and I

The oldest blood in the world

A blood thin and clear and fine

While in the veins of the always poor

And in the veins

Of the new-rich men

Flowed a blood thick as gruel

And muddy as a ditch.

Finally she lay dying

In her eighty sixth year

A woman wearied by compromise

Her legs quilted with arthritis

And with only a hard cough

For comfort

I looked deep into her eyes

Her poor bleary eyes

And prayed that she would not grieve

So much about the house.

I had learnt by then

Most lessons of defeat,

Had found out that to grow rich

Was a difficult feat.

The house was crouching

On its elbows then,

It looked that night in the pallid moon

So grotesque and alive.

When they burnt my great grandmother

Over logs of the mango tree

I looked once at the house

And then again and again

For I thought I saw the windows close

Like the closing of the eyes

I thought I heard the pillars groan

And the dark rooms heave a sigh.

I set forth again

For other towns,

Left the house with the shrine

And the sands

And the flowering shrubs

And the wide rabid mouth of the Arabian Sea.

I know the rats are running now

Across the darkened halls

They do not fear the dead

I know the white ants have reached my home

And have raised on walls

Strange totems of burial.

At night, in stillness,

From every town I live in

I hear the rattle of its death

The noise of rafters creaking

And the windows’ whine.

I have let you down

Old house, I seek forgiveness

O mother’s mother’s mother

I have plucked your soul

Like a pip from a fruit

And have flung it into your pyre

Call me callous

Call me selfish

But do not blame my blood

So thin, so clear, so fine

The oldest blood in the world

That remembers as it flows

All the gems and all the gold

And all the perfumes and the oils

And the stately Elephant ride……..

TIME AND TIME AGAIN BY A.K. RAMANUJAN

TIME AND TIME AGAIN 
A.K. RAMANUJAN

A.K. Ramanujan is one of India’s finest English language poets. He is best known for his pioneering translations of ancient Tamil poetry into modern English. At the time of his death he was professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and was recognized as the world’s most profound scholar of South Indian languages and culture. His interests included anthropology and folklore. These influenced his work as a craftsman of English. This poem represents the complex distillation of a lifetime of unusual thought and feeling.

Or listen to the clock towers

of any old well-managed city

beating their gongs round the clock, each slightly

off the others’ time, deeper or lighter

in its bronze, beating out a different

sequence each half-hour, out of the accidents

of alloy, a maker’s shaking hand

in Switzerland, or the mutual distances

commemorating a donor’s whim,

the perennial feuds and seasonal alliance

of Hindu, Christian, and Muslim—

cut off sometimes by a change of wind,

a change of mind, or a siren

between the pieces of a backstreet quarrel.

One day you look up and see one of them

eyeless, silent, a zigzag sky showing

through the knocked-out clockwork, after a riot,

a peace-march time bomb, or a precise act

Of nature in a night of lightnings.

THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE BY W.B. YEATS

THE WILD SWANS AT COOLE 
W.B. YEATS

W.B. Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist and mystic. He was one of the driving forces behind the Irish Literary Revival, and was co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

The trees are in their autumn beauty,

The woodland paths are dry,

Under the October twilight the water

Mirrors a still sky;

Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine-and-fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn has come upon me

Since I first made my count;

I saw, before I had well finished,

All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings

Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,

And now my heart is sore.

All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,

The bell-beat of their wings above my head,

Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,

They paddle in the cold

Companionable streams or climb the air;

Their hearts have not grown old;

Passion or conquest, wander where they will,

Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water,

Mysterious, beautiful;

Among what rushes will they build,

By what lake’s edge or pool

Delight men’s eyes when I awake some day 

To find they have flown away?

TREES BY EMILY DICKINSON

TREES BY EMILY DICKINSON

Emily Dickinson is regarded as one of America’s quintessential poets of the nineteenth century. She lived an introverted and hermetic life, and published very few of her poems in her lifetime. Her output, 1789 poems in all, were published posthumously. Her poetry is characterized by unconventional capitalization and extensive use of dashes, along with unusual imagery and lyric style.

The Trees like Tassels hit – and – swung –

There seemed to rise a Tune

From Miniature Creatures

Accompanying the Sun –

Far Psalteries of Summer –

Enamoring the Ear

They never yet did satisfy –

Remotest – when most fair

The Sun shone whole at intervals –

Then Half – then utter hid –

As if Himself were optional

And had Estates of Cloud

Sufficient to enfold Him

Eternally from view –

Except it were a whim of His

To let the Orchards grow –

A Bird sat careless on the fence –

One gossiped in the Lane

On silver matters charmed a Snake

Just winding round a Stone –

Bright Flowers slit a Calyx

And soared upon a Stem

Like Hindered Flags – Sweet hoisted –

With Spices – in the Hem –

’Twas more – I cannot mention –

How mean – to those that see

Vandyke’s Delineation

Of Nature’s – Summer Day!

KUBLA KHAN OR A VISION IN A DREAM: A FRAGMENT BY S.T. COLERIDGE

KUBLA KHAN OR A VISION IN A DREAM: A FRAGMENT 

 S.T. COLERIDGE

S.T. Coleridge was imaginative even as a child. He studied at Cambridge. In 1797, he met Wordsworth; the two belonged to the first generation of Romantic poets. Coleridge was responsible for presenting the supernatural as real and Wordsworth would try to render ordinary reality as remarkable and strange. Byron, Shelley and Keats belonged to the next generation of Romantic Poets. The genesis of this poem was a vision seen by Coleridge in a trance-like state of mind. He tried to capture its essence but an interruption caused an irreparable break in his poetic flow,

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground

With walls and towers were girdled round:

And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,

Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;

And here were forests ancient as the hills,

Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,

A mighty fountain momently was forced;

Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail:

And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,

Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure

Floated midway on the waves;

Where was heard the mingled measure

From the fountain and the caves.

It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw:

It was an Abyssinian maid,

And on her dulcimer she played,

Singing of Mount Abora.

Could I revive within me

Her symphony and song,

To such a deep delight, ’twould win me,

That with music loud and long,

I would build that dome in air,

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!

His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

Weave a circle round him thrice,

And close your eyes with holy dread,

For he on honeydew hath fed,

And drunk the milk of Paradise.