Shanta Acharya was born and educated in Orissa, India. She won a scholarship to Oxford where she completed her doctoral thesis in 1983. She was among the first batch of women admitted to Worcester College in 1979. Between 1983-5 she was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard. Her doctoral study, The Influence of Indian Thought on Ralph Waldo Emerson, was published by The Edwin Mellen Press, USA, in 2001
Her three books of poetry are Looking In, Looking Out (Headland Publications, UK; 2005), Numbering Our Days’ Illusions (Rockingham Press, UK; 1995) and Not This, Not That (Rupa & Co, India; 1994). She has been the founder director of “Poetry in the House” at Lauderdale House in Highgate, London, since 1996. For more information, visit her website: www.shantaacharya.com

 
HERE, NOW


iLife is here, now
seized in a moment’s joy
is zikr, remembering all is divine,
the truth for which we pine.

No words can describe
what remains in us of our samskara –
traces of our ancestors, our shringara –
this world our ornament
making us who we are.

Yet nothing, everything touches
the fountainhead gushing from within us,
moving like a lover,
graceful as lightning,
creating us afresh with each drop of Time.

Making us not fearful, not holding back,
not simply doing one’s duty
but taking flight like the smile of a camel.
 

COCONUT MILK



MMy basket was heavy with shopping,
but the coconut milk was missing.
Sainsbury did not have the ready-to-cook
variety, in a tin, made in Thailand –
creamy as full-fat milk and just as silky.

Will this do? The kind, withered shop assistant
asked, handing me a solid cake of coconut milk.
I smiled; he smiled, shuffled off, satisfied.

That evening I cook the prawns
with fine-chopped onions, mushrooms, tomatoes
stirring in slivers of the milk.

The flavors waft through wide open windows into the sunset.

Moving to the rhythm of old Hindi film songs
you loved to hear, I savour your presence, father.
The sun retires behind
trees that sway to the raga and rasa of living –

I see that like the sun, moon and stars
you are always there, though briefly revealed.
Our paths diverge, and we must let go…

Sprinkling freshly chopped coriander leaves,
ground garlic and crushed chilli on the curry,
my eyes are blinded with grief and a child’s fury.



LONDON: 7th July 2005

A sudden explosion of light,
flash of yellow, blinding
the splinter of glass in my eye –
then silence as if thunder had lost its calling
stunned by the madness of men,
the brain’s beating tide of blood drumming…

People wearing fear on their faces
mouths distorted, screaming
came pouring out of the tunnel
like black smoke, gasping, limping,
stumbling over bodies lying
in the Underground station
some unaware of limbs missing.
Is this our 9/11; terror unfolding?

Unable to protect myself from danger
(I had marched against the war)
I lay paralysed on the bloodied floor
each cell in me a soldier…

Who would not rather live with or without a god?
Trapped in hell, my thoughts were of you
my children, and you whom I hold dear.
Clinging to hope in a dark, cold shelter,
fist tightly wrapped round an angel’s finger
no more a stranger, my fire fighter.

Returning from death’s domain
Life can never be the same again.



11th July 2005

(On the 10th anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica)



Once a cornfield ripening with dreams
is now a monument to man’s monstrosity –
a cemetery where bodies exhumed, identified
are finally laid to rest. But, who can keep
an inventory of postcards from unidentified graves,
from tormented souls wandering the earth
waiting for their haunted death march to end?

Emptiness waits ceremoniously like tombs
as new places of genocide are unearthed:
a soccer field, a school, a hangar,
a quiet riverside, a bend in the road
from where fresh skeletons emerge,
some broken, speaking of horrors untold
as chronicles of killings unfold.

Rough mounds of earth with green headstones,
names and dates of birth inscribed –
eight thousand victims, many teenage boys.
Graves left unattended, unadorned by memories;
none left to bring flowers. In this land
where every Muslim woman lost a husband,
father or son, the bereaved left for foreign shores…

Only the small flower-bed, simple open pavilion
with a tiny crescent, a plain slab of stone
stands as a memorial at Potocari with the invocation:

May revenge be turned into justice,
may mothers’ tears be turned into prayers
that there should be no more Srebrenicas.



MENTAL CHEMISTRY

(For Kate Barton 1946-98)



Caught midway between was and must be
she pours her vitality on the canvas
dispersing, veiling, transforming her creations;
a process of painting purely alchemical
exploring the volatile nature of the world.

The defined field, the warm pond, where float
groups of cell-like clusters, radiating from single,
multiple nodes; lighter, sometimes darker in hue:

In a luminous plasma of blue-grey sky, red-earth sea,
unfathomable, black holes humming
secret harmonies, music of destruction, creation –
capturing her body’s battle with cancer.

When multicellularity goes wrong
it does not lead to the dawn of a new intelligence,
only a growing eclipse wiping out the universe.

Random yet controlled the interaction of turpentine
and varnish on oil-paint emitting dynamism;
though impermanence and instability are never far behind:

Nature Matter, Earth Matter, Chemical Matter,
Urban Matter, Deconstructed Matter –
matter always turning into spirit, the Other.
Something suspended, held over, still to come.

Her Untitled paintings are directions
to fare forward in a time of uncertainty:
The Cultural Sciences – pink, red, blue, green –
each cell purposeful, logical, sublime...