1. Turning over a new leaf
My bookmark
Breaks into a yawn.
2. Gleam the jasmines
Her smiles.
My mother's garden.
3. Dad when he coughs
I reach out
The splinter in my eye.
4. Toothless
My little one gnaws off
pieces of my heart.
5. Mom,
In her tears I launch
my ship.
6. His fingers strum
I take a spin
Through childhood.
7. Lost I wander
The breeze wafts in
new hope.
Dr Mary Annie A. V., (M,Sc., Ph.D) writes under the pen name Anna Maria. She has been the recipient of the Shanker’s International prize in writing at the age of five for her poem titled My Brother, which was subsequently published in the Illustrated Weekly of India. She has been an announcer for the All India Radio English Yuvavani programmes for nearly ten years during her college career and has done several features for the English sections of Yuvavani, AIR, Trivandrum. Though her subject is Zoology, her life is writing and literature and to her the simplest definition of a Poem is : Virgin white paper Raped Rapt. She has been hugely acclaimed online and her poems have been published in Mirror, several anthologies in USA, U.K. and in e-zine magazines, in India and abroad. She has been featured in Jes Führmann’s “The Diary of Pink Pearl, A Bird’s Eye View” released by Bookstand Publishing 2013. (First trilogy in America about a Moluccan cockatoo.), She has also been featured in The Camel Saloon, Destiny Poets, The Little Child Magazine, Muse India, Indian Ruminations, The Plum Tree Books, No Nothing Nowhere, The Origami Publications, The Indian Ruminations, The Taj Mahal Review, The Gulmohar Magazine, Musings: A Mosaic Thanal Online, and many more. Her poems have been translated into Malayalam, Brazil, Arabic, Greek, Russian and French. At present, she works in the University of Kerala and resides in Trivandrum with her husband and three children. She also comperes for Gyanvani FM, Trivandrum. She has two published collections of poems: My Beads Unstrung. by Poetree Garden, Trivandrum (2006) and More Beads Unstrung, by Roots and Wings,(2011).
She has also recently appeared with her short stories in anthologies like Ether Ore.