By Neera Kashyap

Pre-life

Discrimination may be about colour caste race gender.
Discrimination may also be about perceiving right from wrong;
friend from foe; good from bad; law from justice….
Sometimes a person feels like a friend because she has arrived;
a rash of hurts and I see her main concern: to stay arrived.
So discrimination is discernment about what appears to be but isn’t.
The virus rose from the ocean as a pre-life form;
We rose from it, yet it appears to rise from us…
toppling time, assailing us –
fragile yachts on a sea of grabbing waves
that arrive and leave, yet we contrive to stay arrived….
If we befriend ourselves
uncontriving –
we befriend others on this forgiving Earth.
For She waits and waits alone to heal herself.

###

Lockdown of an Elephant King*

He, an elephant cavorted in the waters with his queens, waves echoing their cries:
King, King Gajendra!
Like lightning, a piercing pain gripped his leathery leg and he knew the crocodile like
a memory, a curse, a stabbing insight that this would be no ordinary battle but…
a beginning.

He trumpeted his trauma as declamation; his queens left the water,
Knew
moved away.
It clawed at his flesh, mind and soul; declamations beaten by time, then stilled;
his head bowed for a thousand years…
He dreamt a sage visited a virtuous king – human, devout and loved by his subjects –
who did not rise in greeting. 
Ego was a turgid lake and the crocodile…. saviour…
a beginning.

He knew sorrow and scourge; despair and desolation.
Death in his breath, he prayed for the first time,
struggled to lift a lotus to the skies.
That instant –
a blazing light, a hurtling disk – the pain left.
The crocodile’s severed head floated on slime.
Jaws clenched, it had felt the same pain;
voiceless, it had spoken through him,
through his body, mind and soul…till the light came and
freed him first…
a beginning.
—
*Based on the legend, Gajendra moksha from the Bhagavata Purana,

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Journey home
Dark clouds chase the moon
Sun burns through cloudless skies
they walk through suns and moons 

—

Neera Kashyap has worked on health, social and environmental communications. As an author, she has published a book of stories for young adults titled, ‘Daring to dream’ and contributed to five prize-winning anthologies for children. As a literary writer of short fiction, poetry, essays and book reviews, her work has appeared in international journals (Setumag & Virtual Verse from USA; Clarendon Publishing House and The Poet from U.K.); in South Asian journals (Kitaab, Mad in Asia Pacific & Papercuts); and in several Indian journals including Usawa, Out of Print, Narrow Road, Erothanatos and in an anthology, ‘Hibiscus’ on poems that heal and empower. She lives in Delhi.