To My Daughter

N. Balamani Amma (b. 1909

Daughter, lying on a snow-white bed

far away in a hospital,
are you weaving midnight into day
with the dark threads of pain?

Don't be depressed.
When we, too full of life,
rush about too much and need rest
the Goddess of Creation offers us a sickbed.
Lie back, be refreshed; reinvigorate yourself.
There are so many steps still to be climbed.

Reading your poems in this dew-wet courtyard

I wonder whether the spirit in you,
which makes life blossom,
hurt you more than the body
that grew inside me like a flower.
These cocoons you've spun,
to put to sleep the worms
gnawing at your core,
burst open; and wings,
jostling, fluttering, rising,
Swarm my mind.

Your mind may grow restless with unhappy thoughts,

your body may be weary of household tasks
but I have no fears for you.
Your power to turn worms into butterflies
comforts me.
 The Black Hen

- by A K Ramanujan

"It must come as leaves 

to a tree 

or not at all. 

Yet it comes sometimes 

as the black hen 

with the red round eye 

on the embroidery 

stitch by stitch 

dropped and found again

and when it's all there 

the black hen stares 

with its round red eye 

and you're afraid."

 Her Garden in finicky chaos

by Meena Alexander in a sky so flat and blue

that light mirrors itself

The mountains crackle as if on water, soundlessly.

they are full of flint,

the cicada bristles So losing body

,it does not sing she crept into her own soul

in grandmother’s garden and she slept.

as mulberry trees As young goats leap over cracks

gnarled like her hands in the garden walls,

start their long slide as the cicada shunts sparks

seawards. from its wings

I remember her.

I imagine her sitting

under the mulberry leaves,
hot fruit splashed
to her eyes,
a blindness cleaned
in that solitary house
when trees clamber
out of bark
and swim
to a rock that is black
and bare
and like nothing
else in this homeland.

I like to think
she died in the day
her face set heavenward,
exacting little attention
from the sun —
once risen it sets