SEVEN POEMS BY AMBIKA TALWAR - A VERY FINE POET

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. 

               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.

All rights reserved by the author.

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)

 Three Ells

~ Ambika Talwar

     ~ 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

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

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

I recall camphor of night's breath
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

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

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)

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