58 years
They will point and say,
“She is the one trying to sleep
for 58 years.”
Walking around this planet,
a checker board of war and peace,
holding her body like a lamp,
walking around and around
lighting nothing up
except her own darkness—
She is the one asking the latitudes.
what kind of a road are they
that go in circles and have no destination,
and to the longitudes,
ropeways to heaven, she says
they think they can touch God high,
but come down unfailingly to earth
on the other side.
She knows there are claimed
and unclaimed lands in our souls,
some we yield, some are taken,
somehow we go on living.
See her walking they will say,
hearing the children fall
as stunned birds against the pane of life.
See her stopping at the graves of poets,
reading the tombstones of their poems:
Amichai, Hikmet, Dawish, Rumi—
Like her, lost planets circling in space.
________________________________________________________________________
Cultural Appropriation
These are times of cultural appropriation,
Do not cry for Palestine!
Do not speak in the tongue of the
slave women ridden, to birth more slave children.
Do not be molten from the shrieking skirts of flame
that enveloped the witches in Salem,
Do not feel your body splitting by the hard driven chisel of
a rapist in El Salvador.
And do not
Be the cheek in every city in every country
on which a purple bruise ripens like a grape.
Do not be the shore on which a tiny shoe washes up.
Do not be the light a child can come into from a predator’s cave.
Do not be the page for a poem that is all languages and
that can be worked out in all syllables.
Figure out sternly who and what is yours.
And lament only for your well running dry.
And when you die,
don’t remember it is one earth that will receive you,
one sky that your smoke will curl into,
one water that will sweep you around the globe.
Usha Akella has authored five books of poetry, three chapbooks, and scripted two musical dramas. She earned an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge, UK. I will not bear you sons was published by Spinifex Press, the well noted feminist press in Australia. Her The Waiting was published by Sahitya Akademi, (India’s highest Literary authority) in 2019 followed by the Mantis Editores, Mexico edition in Spanish translated by Elsa Cross. She was selected as a Creative Ambassador for the City of Austin for 2019 & 2015 Her work has been included in theHarper Collins (India) Anthology of English Poets. She is the founder of Matwaala ( www.matwaala.com) and hosts www.the-pov.com, an interview and conversations website. Matwaala is the first South Asian Diaspora Poets Festival in the US that she co-directs with Pramila Venkateswaran. The festival is seriously dedicated to increasing the visibility of South Asian poets in the mainstream. She is also the founder of the Poetry Caravan in New York and Austin which takes poetry readings to the disadvantaged in women’s shelters, senior homes, and hospitals. Several hundreds of readings have reached these venues via this medium. The City of Austin proclaimed January 7th as Poetry Caravan Day. She has been published in numerous Literary journals, and has been invited to prestigious international poetry festivals in JLF-Houston, Romania, Canada, Slovakia, Nicaragua, Macedonia, Colombia, Slovenia, India etc. She has won literary prizes such as the Poetry Society of India 2019 Commendation prize, Nazim Hikmet award, Open Road Review Prize and Egan Memorial Prize and earned finalist status in a few US based contests. She read with a group of eminent South Asian Diaspora poets at the House of Lords in June 2016. She has been invited as a keynote speaker to TLAN’s Power of Words conference 2019 and the Turkish Center in Austin. She’s been interviewed widely. She has written a few quixotic nonfiction prose pieces published in The Statesman and India Currents. Her work ranges from feminist/activist to Spiritual and all things in-between.