Poetry at the Ghats /My publications

Poetry at the Ghats 

Mystic Moments

Solid sheets of rain brings 

the pit pat of fossilized words

black clouds unloaded themself

when weaver created craft of embroidery 

in the flesh of men.

I just sat upon the quay,

though quandary was in the ripples of river

"don't get yourself flustered”

I thought for a while

people were dipping urn one by one

reciting incantation with folded hand in sun

ashes of my loved ones began to run

trailing in scripture's line

tearing away …

my blood gushed in Ganga

I picked up my destiny,

a clod,

and waded my wounds

leaving behind my mystic moments

at the wharf,

I drank a drop of love brewing in wine!

Dr Pragya Suman

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I wrote the poem mystic moments after visiting Varanasi Ghats. This poem is included in my debut book Lost Mother. The ghats of Varanasi have been a mystical cauldron for both western and Indian writers. Allen Ginsberg lived for a year near the ghats. An American poet Mary Oliver also visited India and detoured through Varanasi. She was captivated by the morning scenery of Varanasi ghat. Mary wrote the book A thousand Mornings which won the Pulitzer Prize. I read that book and was amused to see that she has included Varanasi ghat’s morning among the many mornings in the book.

She said “I went to India and was quite taken with. There is a feeling there, things are holy first and useful second”

---

VARANASI

By Mary Oliver

Early in the morning we crossed the ghat,

where fires were still smoldering,

and gazed, with our Western minds, into the Ganges.

A woman was standing in the river up to her waist;

she was lifting handfuls of water and spilling it

over her body, slowly and many times,

as if until there came some moment

of inner satisfaction between her own life and the river’s.

Then she dipped a vessel she had brought with her

and carried it filled with water back across the ghat,

no doubt to refresh some shrine near where she lives,

for this is the holy city of Shiva, maker

of the world, and this is his river.

I can’t say much more, except that it all happened

in silence and peaceful simplicity, and something that felt

like that bliss of a certainty and a life lived

in accordance with that certainty.

I must remember this, I thought, as we fly back

to America.

Pray God I remember this.