AMBIKA TALWAR is an India-born author, wellness consultant, artist, and educator whose vision is to realize her sacred destiny and invite you to your brilliance. As a poet of ecstatic verse, her poetry is a “bridge to other worlds.” Some publications include: CQ-California Quarterly; Collateral Damage; Grateful Conversations; Kyoto Journal; Chopin with Cherries; On Divine Names; St. Julian Press; Tower Journal; Tebot Bach; VIA-Vision in Action; in Poets on Site collections; Life and Legends, and others. She authored 4 Stars & 25 Roses (poems for her father) and My Greece: Mirrors & Metamorphoses, a poetic-spiritual travelogue that probes what is our human purpose in a roving personal and mythical narrative. This book is on Amazon.
She won the Best Original Story award for her film “Androgyne” in Belgium. She asserts it is time for creative visionaries to offer narratives that change our worldview, and the big film studios must play a part in this transformation.
She also offers group healing workshops noting that poetry and healing go well together for language is deeply coded in our cells. Her intuitive and subtle healing practices achieve rapid results for clients ready for change. Loving this work, she says in these fascinating troubling times, we must call in our best possible resilient self.
She also offers group healing workshops noting that poetry and healing go well together for language is deeply coded in our cells. Her intuitive and subtle healing practices achieve rapid results for clients ready for change. Loving this work, she says in these fascinating troubling times, we must call in our best possible resilient self.
An English professor at Cypress College, she lives in Los Angeles, Ca and New Delhi, India. And when she can, she picks up her paints and enjoys play of color, a pleasure for which she wishes to have more time.
Doors: Nothing is Ever Lost
~ Ambika Talwar
Minarets come into being with the drumming. Three claps – She
arrives. Goddess of radiance slowly crumbles illusions. We surrender to her hideous smile. Dropping
aged cloaks, we move into our bliss. Her mien changes form and expression; her
limbs contort then gracefully weave matrix of all that is.
In such hush lush, we find our stillness, we find our center,
we find dance of grace. Her beatific eyes bring us to ecstasy. Thusly, Shiva
comes alive, rocks to mountains to galaxies. Such beauty of the terrifying
wanders into our ache-less minds, stirring awe.
No more sacrifice, Beloveds – a dying paradigm – now is way of
cosmic wonder. Flowers dance on shoulders of mountains...white on
Mondays...yellow on Thursdays. Lavender sage tulsi musk permeate edges
of rivers where water comes to rest.
Drumming ripples until dawn cracks open egg of sky. My eyes take in vast turmoil of time; rivers
of light pour through my dark corners like sweetest joy, as Gratitude for this
wonder impregnates cosmos!
I ask, I command: Show me more!
Three galaxies emerge ... far there. Here in my heart gazing into stillness are
eyes of deer golden-brown with desire where floats a full moon, silver-white
unyielding...! She rises in love that has no other way but to be itSelf fully.
Irreducible. Irrevocable. Luminous wonder walks ground of being until nothing
is left—nothing can be. This is gateway of all promise—nothing is ever lost.
Fallen leaves
stir soul
as moonlight
skirts footfall
doors creak
open –
Walk through Beloved
to hinterland
of wonder
let love prick
your burns
Ready to be
skinned
alive? Fool!
Drop the mountain
Sit by small
silent stone.
#
(April 2018)
~ after photograph of Japanese red maple
Am walking these leaves
embers of wise voices
muted cicadas
near where a river runs
whipper-twittering of a single bird
slices air
in-an-instant auburn reds
meld in gold
My heart is afired
wandering between gullies
mulch making continues
reminds me of Kabir's potter
who makes dust of whom
How much space and time
dance between each lick of flame
each particle
becoming a window
each breath a raaga
music of loss of longing of love
Three ells which mark
our days from end to end
as maple woods change gold
to blackish driftwood
hanging in the sky
between my glances
where you reside
between my glances
where you reside
Where spirit
becomes flesh
crimson vermilion
crashes across blue
I linger gazing at sage-like trees
my toes fresh out
of freezing
river currents
glare at my hesitations.
#
(11 Nov. 2018)
Night's Silent
Aroma
~ Ambika Talwar
Camphor of night
pervades my waking
moments as mingled thoughts of you
moments as mingled thoughts of you
swing
into view tied to tender habits
Moon's single ray
a silver cord
measures distances
– one end swallowed
by old sun's burn. With eyes closed
by old sun's burn. With eyes closed
I recall camphor
of night's breath
when smiling you held my face as smoke filled
borrowed room with scattered rose petals.
when smiling you held my face as smoke filled
borrowed room with scattered rose petals.
We
slipped we sank on gold-green lawns
as sunlight traveled momentarily laughing
along our silhouetted undulation sinking
as sunlight traveled momentarily laughing
along our silhouetted undulation sinking
into night's
silent aroma...
You hummed into my
heart's crevices
made me forego a
step so I lose balance
Doors shatter
these days wildly opening
to directions
hidden – as a cleaved heart shies
far somewhere
between ache-less stars
#
(12 Sept. 2019)
Losses Into Treasures
~
Ambika Talwar
My
father - dear glorious one.
How
do you fare so far away? I am
readying
for another visit to
a
distant home. I miss you as mad
earth
who contains all our stories.
Your
absence so palpable – even trees
bend
to gaze in my eyes; in these presences
I
gather riches of your wise brown eyes
I
wrote of wild moons ago.
Some
riches are borne of loss – all losses
become
treasures – not yours not now
maybe
tomorrow. I cannot shed pain
of
my lostness of you.
Wild
orange blue bird-like flower courses
through
my domain – walls wither.
There
are no excuses for not speaking
tongues
of love. Moments of eternal stories
gather
moss strung in my heart’s eyes.
I
must speak of them now. To you.
Tales
from my little days – as teen years
pulled
me tall. My injured hand,
shy
smile, falling star – maker of tea.
I could never say them aloud; power of silence
I could never say them aloud; power of silence
of
shutting had me captured with tales
of
she's too much.
Find
out now – how too much I am
I
love too much to come close…
you
with the grand trine in the skies
that
mirrors mine – Stargazers have told me
But
I could tear apart the sky looking
for
you – to tell a story a day for 100 years.
Your palms bruised curved ridges
disappear
into a lost horizon –
I
search – my shadow walks behind me…
Your
voice remembers.
#
(11
Nov. 2018)
Wound: Point of
Origins
~ Ambika Talwar
for Rumi’s 'The wound is the place
where the Light enters you.'
If the wound is the place where light enters through,
then I am shot with white and gold;
I pulse infinitely in geometric patterns.
If the wound is point of origins,
the gate after gate of heaven, then my body-being
must be the paradise I had quite forgotten.
I ask for that wholeness to enwrap me
beyond time and fragmentation.
If wound you speak of is a paradigm of welcome,
then I am that curtain that parts and all light subsumes
my all and you – for what is a repast made of?
If wound is a cry of longing, then light is that love
that makes me whole and you.
Stitches us up
with sutures beyond skin – nerves enlivening
even passersby waiting for a sip of rain.
This bird of my heart sings, so I be not
forgotten, nor the hem of my skirt.
#
(21 July 2015)
Oh Poets! Oh
Travelers!
~ Ambika Talwar
Poet! What makes
your heart hum?
Your travels
tipple across time whose breath
a cosmic silk
thread is a stitch in your palm…
whose words and
silence, dew and raindrops
carpet lands you
traverse – cliffs riffs rocks
under mulch,
fragrance of jasmine, a stolen walnut?
Five syllables
from a running squirrel who emerges
after season has
slept, then awakes in mating –
from shore to
shore aquiver because that is how
you describe the
waves and the shivering.
Sometimes, it is
just because you are wordless
your feet bleed on
morning dew
skin is cracked
deserts.
Your eyes darken
like flowers at night
as shadows that
called you to journey – the ache
beckons,
disappearing, then reappearing.
How you hungered
for the hungry
to realize you
were the famished one
eating words that
fall from witnessing oak.
Stop the shivering
– stillness like satin milk
makes the paper
you write on an epic of your fingernails
mean something:
light of syllabary
– coat of love, a favorite shirt
muslin of ancient
lands, fathers, mothers
parchment, rice
paper made by hand
numb smarting
fingers that tear leaves into pools
of water to make
an inkwell... Water for your travels
is wisdom enough
to laugh white teeth in sunlight.
Same way river
runs on by. Desire turns
her head – sees
you kneeling.
#
(4 Dec. 2012)
Night Sky Hum~ Ambika Talwar
Eyes open wide
Kuan Yin adorns laddered night
stars wonder and asterisk…
When my being weaves in night sky hum
a kind of rest subsumes my skin -
I feel a tension between wishing to curl away
or pry my eyes open to see, do, know more.
My head spins in wonder as a poem
becomes memory – will I recall these lines?
One stitch ladders through weaves of night…
I cannot sleep until I shed leaves of gratitude
A summer tree springs with turning of season
singed aria - sudden wind swifts inward
tremors of gratefulness; I wish each finger-tip
mark a wing on 1,000 poems
Beauty of this world wraps a blanket on my bones
satin strings hum a lullaby, but I resist
for I might lose a verse or two – I wish…
I wish I could smell you
I surrender my feelings to lull - for I feel so full...
tender bed turns my curling toes and hair
May sweet night's gentle dreams fall
upon your tensile curving frame –
listen to drum of your heart beat
even if mine is so far away…
#
(24th Sept. 2017)
Posts
