BROWSE Columns
✕
seed
stem
tulip
soaking sun
soaking rain showers
new buds bursting from bruised dawn light
alluring bees to our shared gaze from the patio
each petal fleeting: whorled thumbprints, nautilus shells,
dewy fronds, spiral galaxy arms, us—
*
The garden I once tended is overrun,
rhubarb stalks reddened past pliancy,
barrels full of herbs rotting in the sun;
vegetal patch ruled now by compliancy,
not care. But sometimes, being myopic
helps. Look closer: there’s lions’ mane
dandelion heads spreading, entropic
clover, waxy purslane that fruits in rain,
a primordial symphony drowning out
violas of tomatoes once arcing in cages
with oboes of violets. I want to shout
at the moon, turn you into turned pages
of a farmer’s almanac that lied to plant.
I should have listened to Immanuel Kant.
Pushcart-prize winning poet, Dr. Ravi Shankar is the author / translator / editor of 17 books, including the Memoir Magazine and Connecticut Book Award finalist "Correctional," the Muse India-award winning translations of Andal, "The Autobiography of a Goddess," and W.W. Norton & Co's "Language for a New Century," called "a beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Caravan, The Chronicle of Higher Education and on the BBC, NPR and the PBS Newshour. He founded Drunken Boat, one of the world's oldest electronic journals of the arts, has won residences and fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, been featured at Ubud and the Jaipur Literary Festival, given a TEDx talk on #impuritanthinking and currently teaches creative writing for the New York Writers Workshop and at Tufts University.
