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Abhay K: Blossom as Ipe Amarelo and other poems

Abhay K: Blossom as Ipe Amarelo and other poems
Abhay K. Photo credit of the poet

Poet’s Note: ‘I let my poems grow naturally’


As a poet, I read a lot of poetry written by other poets and write a little. I don’t have a fixed time to write poems. I write whenever I find time. When I was posted in Moscow I used to write poems in the Metro while commuting from my residence to the university and office and back. I can find solitude and concentration to write even in the most crowded places. First an image, then a line comes and then gradually a poem starts taking shape. I write it down and revisit it after several days, or weeks or even months, then chisel it until all the unnecessary words are gone and not a single word can be further removed. Sometimes, I send it to the literary magazines for publication, others times I keep it with me if it is for a book length project (over 40 poems).

I have mostly written about places, monuments, people, customs, traditions, where I mix mythology, history, legends, facts, experiences and imagination to create poems. Lately, with the growing concerns of climate change and biodiversity loss worldwide, my focus has been to write about the unique flora and fauna of Madagascar and a long love poem that brings together the ancient annual weather pattern of Monsoon and the richness and diversity of flora, fauna, cuisine, costumes, fragrances of the islands of the Indian ocean, India and the countries straddling across the Himalayas. This is the first book-length poem I have attempted inspired by Kalidasa’s Meghduta.

I mostly write in series of couplets of short lines, mostly unrhymed. I don’t have any particular length for my poems. I let them grow naturally as much as they can grow, but most of my poems are short poems except for a few like ‘Prufrock at the Carnival in Rio’ or ‘Fire and Sermon’ or ‘Ancient Land’, or ‘Diplomacy’, which are basically rewritings of poems of T.S. Eliot in contemporary context. 

I grew up reading poets such as Ramdhari Singh Dinkar, Sohanlal Dwivedi, Makhanlal Chaturvedi, Nirala, Kabir, Rahim, Sumitranandan Pant, Harivansh Rai Bachchan and later William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, H.G Longfellow, William Blake, Dylan Thomas. Then, I discovered Walt Whitman, Wislawa Szymborska, Derek Walcott, T.S. Elliot, Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Ceslaw Milosz, Basho, Issa, Buson, Pushkin, Du Fu, Bukowski, A. K. Ramanujam, Jayanta Mahapatra, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney and recently the rich world of Indian poetry spread over 3,000 years from 28 Indian languages, including great works by Sangam Poets, Kalidasa, Vidyapati, Muddupalani, among others. They have all had an influence on my writing and I keep revisiting their works while exploring the works of new poets. 

I started writing after joining the Indian Foreign Service in 2003 and wrote my first book titled River Valley to Silicon Valley, a memoir of three generations of my family and my first 25 years, after arriving in Moscow on my first diplomatic assignment, where I learned Russian language and literature at Moscow State University. It was published by Bookwell India in 2007. My first poetry collection Enigmatic Love was published by the same publisher in 2009. My second poetry collection Fallen Leaves of Autumn was published as an e-book in 2010, my third poetry collection Candling the Light was published by Yash Publications in 2011 and fourth one Remains by HarAnand Publications in 2012. My fifth collection of poems The Seduction of Delhi was published by Bloomsbury India in 2014 and since then they have also published my sixth poetry collection The Eight-Eyed Lord of Kathmandu (2018) and the eight poetry collection The Alphabets of Latin America (2020). My seventh poetry collection The Prophecy of Brasilia was published by Colletivo Editorial, Brazil. I have put together a collection of Haiku on the unique flora and fauna of Madagascar, titled The Magic of Madagascar, a collection of unpublished poems written between 2010-2020, titled Stray Poems, and I’m working on a long poem titled Monsoon, inspired by Kalidasa’s Meghaduta

During this period, I have also edited a number of books which include CAPITALS (2017), 100 Great Indian Poems (2018), 100 More Great Indian Poems (2019), New Brazilian Poems (2019), The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems (2020) and The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems (2020).  

The year 2020 has been a productive year for me with additional time available because of lockdown since March 2020. I used this time to edit an anthology of Indian love poems from over two dozen Indian languages covering a time span of over 3000 years. It was published in October 2020 as The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems. I also used this time to read and translate Kalidasa’s Meghduta and Ritusamhara from Sanskrit into English. I also read a number of poetry books during this period. Antananarivo skies are clear and free from light pollution during most of the year and so I started looking at the night sky more attentively and carefully and was duly rewarded with sighting of all the planets of our solar system which can be seen with the naked eye viz. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, as well as the most prominent star constellations such as Orion, Canis Major, Taurus, Scorpious and Sagittarius and the bright stars such as Sirius, Canopus, Betelguese, Rigel, Aldebaran, Antares among others. This also set me on the path of writing anthems on planets of the solar system, which were published on 21st December 2020, on the day of the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. I am fascinated by the stories/mythologies built around constellations and am planning to read and write about them. So, darkness has its own beauty which is not visible under the glare of the sun and we should explore and revel in the beauty that darkness offers to us. My translation of Meghaduta will be published this year by Bloomsbury India. 


Blossom as Ipe Amarelo


i

May you always 
blossom as Ipe Amarelo 

muse, angel, light
how should I call you

making love 
is an act of faith in darkness

do we own each other if we spend 
an hour drinking coffee

do we own each other if we spend
a lifetime together

can anyone ever own anyone?


ii

Falling in love even for a moment
means being blessed

a moment with the beloved
means more than anything else 


being in love is being in the moment
now, right now, the eternal now.

iii

Everyone wants to possess 
you for eternity

May I borrow you from time
for an evening

knowing this is it, 
this is all?


iv

Rock rock
paper paper
scissor scissor

rock scissor
scissor rock
paper scissor

may you always
win the game 
of life!


v

What magic you do
mere your presence
brightens everything

your face glowing 
like our galaxy 
in the southern Atacama skies.


vi

If i say I love you
you’ll never 
see me again

so I keep loving you
quietly, writing
poems in silence.



vii

This afternoon
we stole an hour or two from time,
you said —“it’s a great escape”

two tiny specs of flesh
and blood, a mass 
of molecules spinning, 

dust and dust, ecstatic dust
and yet a moment
in the whole universe, 
infinite eternity.

“Life is a suffering” —
the enlightened one said
after years of meditation
under the great Bodhi tree

and that’s true 
but what about the stolen 
moments of ecstasy 
an hour or two

stolen from the infinite space-time,
the pull and push of gravitational 
waves, just two specs 

of molecular dust
you and I and 
nothing else but 
a sunny day and blue sky

full of white clouds
and a heron looking
at its own reflection 
in the pool

you, pure and white
like this heron share
a moment of flight
with me, just you and me

and this moment exists too
in this very world, however ephemeral 
and is as true as Buddha’s words

a moment when time
and space cease to exist
and there is pure bliss.



Selected Haiku from The Magic of Madagascar


water droplets dripping 
from purple Jacaranda
— spring rain

standing
below a baobab —
what a blessing!

at noon
from nowhere —
a panther chameleon

golden mantella
making mating calls
— how pleasant

haunting wail
of Indri-Indri —
dawn in Andasibe


Andasibe rainforests are located in the east coast of Madagascar
Indri Indri is the largest species of surviving lemur. It is critically endangered.

Vasa parrots singing  
the whole day long —
monsoon in Madagascar

stretching its arms 
in prayer —
a traveller’s palm

Venus peeping 
through Pine tree
— dusk in Tana

Soumanga sunbird
sipping aloe nectar —
dawn in the spiny forest


midday in Ankarana —
thousands of cicadas
vibrating their tymbals



I Drink Celestial Light


Every dawn is a treat
every dusk is full of wonder
light of the sun slowly fading
giving way to the soft light
of the moon and stars and
constellations, appearing one by one

Isn’t it magic?
What could be more magical than this? 

During these hours of night 
I truly drink the celestial light 
my eyes roving from one star to another 
looking carefully at the star patterns 
locating constellations 

then dawn offers its own wonders 
with the sunlight breaking in 
with birdsong, bright stars still around
before the sun claims the whole sky.


Moon and Venus


Venus shines brightly
dueting with the moon
like two celestial lovers
playing with each other

Moon wants to surprise
changing its shape and size
Venus responds lovingly
shining even more bright

Then they disappear 
one after another
to spend the night
making love to each other

only to reappear at dawn 
shyly just before sunrise. 

The essay and the poems are part of our Poetry Special Issue (January 2021), curated by Shireen Quadri and Nawaid Anjum. © The Punch Magazine. No part of this essay or the new poems exclusively featured here should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.   
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