A. Anupama
A tree laid its crown on the ground, mindful of the saplings nearby, mindful to lay it across the meadow somehow, away from the sculptures. Now an attentive ear much taller than a poet stays cocked at the side of the footpath: an enormous ellipse of tangled root, rock, and earth. On a bright morning…
There are moments I don’t photograph or write about, though they are worthy of a creative expression. Maybe that’s partly why I took up painting and guitar this year, to see if more angles of approach could widen my praise of life. But it hasn’t really changed the level of silence I keep. A blue…
Painting while listening to virtual programs on Zoom, Crowdcast, Vimeo, Coursera and other platforms has given me a new appreciation for those students who sketch and doodle in my classes. I’m not sure if my topics ever influence their artwork, but I know I find interweavings in my experiences of observing sound while engaged in…
The clouds glance down and move off in great billows this afternoon, and I’m reviewing notes for the creative writing course I’ll be teaching again. It’s a busyness that I like, even though it’s really summer’s end when I do this. I had so many ideas at the beginning of summer, but now it’s all…
Our dogwood tree has already set its fists for next spring’s blossoms. I don’t want to believe that autumn is so near. But I try to convince myself of the truth with a painting. I wanted to copy the beautiful tree in the center of this folio page, which was painted in Herat in the…
If suns grew in a field together, would they get along? If stars fell into fields, would we memorialize them? If the crescent moon mowed the field, what kind of hay would that make? Poems are made of heat, light, consciousness. On a hot day in August like this, maybe poems get lost. Maybe in…
My older daughter is a real entomophobe, and she protested by loud wailings my choice of subject for yesterday’s painting. I had said “dragonfly” and so I agreed that it did sound scary. Is “damselfly” more charming? They are, in fact, two different types of creatures in the order Odonata. But maybe they occupy a…
A little bit of poetry is often much better than a lot of it. I think this is because of the space it leaves for your own silence and inner eye to work. We exchange with one another one long and secret gaze of grief, neither idle nor reckless.From the poem titled “Shahrazad” in Saffron…
And the sky might read over your shoulder. It has a color and a voice that can show you more of the poet’s intention. Yesterday I brought Adonis: Selected Poems, translated by Khaled Mattawa to a friend’s house to share in evening light, just at the edge of a storm front, taking the risk of…
My son’s supervisor at his summer internship in New Jersey is Indian, and suddenly my son says to me that he’d like to read more about India. His aim, I suppose, is to have more to talk about at work. But, being the ever-annoying poet-mom, I replied, “you can always know more about India, but…
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