Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










YOUR STORY by Usha Akella

(for Kamala Das)

 You pulled weeds from underground

 unpleated the years in poems, peeled yourself

 as an onion wanting the naked center

 your poems rode fierce chariots

 clattering under a granite tradition

 your womb like a chakka pazam teeming with

 achenes of desires.      Harbinger trumpet   pen.

 
You knew

 women are fields filled with seeds

 sowed with a mother’s latent vengeance

 a father’s blind eye

a husband’s need,   a woman’s stories.

 How then      why then       when then

 the pilgrimage of disrobing to black-shrouded body

 how did you slip through the crevices in your story?

USHA AKELLA