Poetry Gives Wings To Many Words by Ramnath Subramanian
Is the moon “a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky — filled with pretty people?”
Is spring “like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere) arranging a window?”
Is it true that “all nearness pauses, while a star can grow?”
To look at language in a new way is to look at the world anew, and to gather in our arms, with each dappled noun and each soft participle, a more elevated measure of humanity.
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Softly, Like A Breeze by Ramnath Subramanian
Softly like a breeze
steals into a room,
I bring you good news
of this world:
an emerald plate
of bird songs;
and in my other hand,
a flutter of leaves.
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For A World Gone By: Words Of Sadness by Ramnath Subramanian
The world is bent,
and crooked are the ways of men
who rest their might on greed;
the light retreats and cities burn:
beware the darkening hour,
pay heed.
The man of strength now walks with a limp,
is base, confused and weak;
a stranger drum now beats and calls
as truth concedes and looks oblique.
No stone no steel will win the day,
as the churning earth goes retrograde,
and right and reason will betray
the prophet to a brazen blade.
Remember the days happy once
that held out a promise, but now are done.
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Golden Roads by Ramnath Subramanian
At the crepuscular hour, a low-flying owl startled me out of my reverie in the backyard.
A full moon smiled upon this incident.
Said the Moon: “An owl is an ordinary creature until you look at it extraordinarily.”
So are a blade of grass, a raindrop on a broad lotus leaf, and a scent of jasmine made special to embrace the circumference of the earth.
All roads are golden, for the gold is in our eyes.
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Ramnath Subramanian: Reading increases literary appetite
If I had wanted to lead a quiet and dull life, I should have kept my distance from books. As it happened, I was interminably fond of them, and the more I read the more my appetite grew, with the result that my life became agitated with a restlessness that could be satiated only by adventures and more books.
While attending college in India, during a summer’s hiatus, I wandered in the foothills of the Himalayas, thinking about the slopes and peaks of dozens of poems I had committed to memory.
In the mountains, there was peace and stunning quietude, and time and space enough to contemplate all the nuggets of poetic wisdom that Rabindranath Tagore had brought together in “Fireflies.”
I traveled the length and breadth of West Bengal by train and bus, and made a stop at Shantiniketan, looking there to find a chapter in Tagore’s life.
I could not stop at Malgudi, for it was an invented place, but R.K. Narayan had imbued it so richly with Indian culture and mores that Malgudi could be found anywhere in India.
Outside the Meenakshi Temple in Madhurai, I danced in the rain while the rainwater was “running in rills through the narrow lanes like a laughing boy.” It was an invitation to a romance, or simply to “be wet with a decent happiness.”
While many of the books I had read drew me toward temples and caves, busy streets and bazaars, rivers and boat rides, some simply put the fuel in my spirit to march down a street holding a placard. I sought not the lotus’ serenity nor the jasmine’s allure, but the voice to speak out against some form of injustice.
At college in Calcutta, I organized a march to protest the arrest and imprisonment of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Had I not read his books and become entangled in their compelling narrative, I would have been spared the confrontation with police outside the Russian embassy. That day, my friends and I were taken into custody for disturbing the peace.
It was also books that enticed me to seek new adventures outside the Indian subcontinent. From early childhood, I had been fascinated by the images proffered by novelists and poets about the English countryside. If the chaffinch sang “on the orchard bough in England,” I wanted to hear it.
And then there was London — the city that “doth like a garment wear/ the beauty of the morning.”
Holding on to these images, I pursued my dream, and landed in London in 1975. What a visual feast it was to be standing on the land that was the setting for so many novels I had read and reread.
This was Thomas Hardy’s land, and the land of the Bronte sisters. I cannot adequately describe the transcendence I felt gadding about the streets of England or walking along the Thames and the Avon.
Then there was the special thrill when a friend drove me to Bradford, West Yorkshire, for a wedding. Howarth, the village where the Bronte sisters lived and wrote, was only a short distance away, and I got my fill of moorlands, charming pathways, and ruins, all of which had informed the writing of “Wuthering Heights” and “Jane Eyre.”
If it had not been for books, I doubt that I would have embraced a peripatetic lifestyle, or sought out places marked by literary ink. England was only the beginning. The voices of Zola and Voltaire were echoing in my ears. So, too, were other voices pulling me in different directions across Europe.
I could have settled in England, I suppose, but then I heard the voices of Twain and Whitman, and it was time to put on my traveling boots again, and go another mile in a new direction.
Education Matters 