It Wasn’t Time to Go

Now, two years after spending 5 days in the ICU, and a tough recovery period, I finally had the courage to submit my work to literary journals. Knowing I didn’t have the emotional strength to handle rejections, I had to wait. This month three poems found homes—thanks to Loch Raven Journal, Beltway Poetry Journal and Passager. And thank you to my writer groups who kept me going with their love and encouragement. Happy belated Thanksgiving to all my friends everywhere!

Here’s the poem accepted by Beltway Poetry Journal.

Lalita Noronha

Bound

As I lie on a gurney in the emergency room,
my mind slips into another sphere,
a quiet place with no air, no need to breathe.

The planets swirl about me ─
Jupiter and her four moons,
but it is Europa’s voice I hear first,
a spinning shell of ice
sunlight bouncing off cracks.

Around me voices fade,
leaf-green gowns pale under my eyes,
and bands of dark birds,
geese or song birds,
fly in V formations.

I hear their call.
The air off their wing tips will lift me.
I don’t have to fly.

Dusk deepens, the sky cobalt-blue,
threads of daylight weave through.
Last chance, the last flock calls,

but my last inhale
is trapped within a space
where rain drops aren’t yet snow,
water’s not yet steam,
love’s not yet eternal.

Someone asks me something,
I answer binding.
I hear someone shouting, she doesn’t know what she’s saying.

I open my eyes,
see my child at my side,
holding me down.

http://www.beltwaypoetry.com/bound/.

Aren’t we ALL Immigrants or Descendants of Immigrants in America?

Among the many issues plaguing our country today, Immigration is firmly rooted in the American milieu.

I often think of how I came to the U.S as a young girl of 23, who had never seen the inside of an airplane, and had no place to live in (the dorms were full) and no money to live on. I found a place to live with a family close to my university— doing dishes and cleaning up the kitchen each evening after lab work, and on weekends I took care of four children aged 2 to 8, in addition to a few other chores in exchange for room and board. Within that first semester, I could send money home. I had come on a Fulbright Travel Grant which was my ticket to America — the only possible way to get here. At JFK airport, where I had to change planes, I stood in awe watching a “moving stair case” and thought, “My God, what a country!” Then I rode the escalator a few times 🙂

And now, while I dearly love India, the country I was born in, I love America just as much. There are no limits to Love and Gratitude.

The poem below is from my poetry book, “Mustard Seed: A Collage of Science, Art and Love Poems”

IMMIGRANT DANDELION

Deep within the mud-brown ground
of muscle and bone,
pith of water and cell,
a tap root and a million fibrous hairs
run deep
into the belly of the earth,
find room to grow
anywhere,
between cracks in pavements,
sidewalks, walls,
among blades of pristine grass
in purest lawns.
With sunflower yellow blooms
and feathery seeds,
it dares to live and succeed
undaunted by perennial labels,
damned nuisance,
common weed.

If you’d like a signed copy addressed to you, please go to “Books” on this website and click on Mustard Seed. Amazon also sells it but I won’t be able to sign and write in it for you.

Faith, Hope, Love

2016 was a difficult year for me with respect to my health.   And while I am better in 2017,  I continue to struggle with new problems.  Rather than delve into details, I want instead to offer you poems that I’d written some years ago.  I hope they will offer you a small measure of comfort, as it does me.

Faith

Give me faith
the measure of one thimble,
and my soul will sprout,
this cracked and arid land
will bloom green and gold
rich with coconut grove,
and paddy fields, and tea plantations.
Give me faith,
the measure of one thimble,
and I will rise like the Himalaya at dawn.

Hope

Bring me hope
in bright brass urns
of monsoon rain,
between the claps of thunder
under thoughts that fill ponds
and swell the river
Bring me hope
and I will bloom
like a lotus in sun.

(published in Get Well Wishes, Harper San Francisco)

 

Charity

Take me back
to the beginning.
Wrap a peace which falls
like sheer rain
between folds of petals
under blades of grass,
between unanswered questions,
the pain, ripe and raw
pungent as forgiveness.

(published in Serenity Prayers, Andrew McMeel Publishing)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Very happy to tell you that I won my second Maryland Individual Artist Award, this time in poetry (the last one was fiction some years ago.) I submitted fifteen poems (the max allowed) that ended up in “Mustard Seed: A Collage of Science, Art and Love Poems.” Also, Beltway Poetry Journal named it one of ten best poetry book in 2016.

In honor of Mother’s Day, here is a poem from my book that I wrote for my grand daughter when my daughter-in-law was in labor.

UNWRITTEN POEM (for Emerson)

That day I wanted to write you a poem,
a villanelle, ghazal, pantoum,
even just a haiku.

I wanted rippled syllables,
rhyming words to squeeze into lines
and spill over when they ought to.

But that day—
there was no language, not even alphabets
for the journey you were taking.

So, I offered you my memory
of your father’s birth,
his twenty-hour journey into a world

soon to be yours.
I offered you what I couldn’t
offer him that day—

my quiet aching heart yearning to take
all the sorrow you would ever face
now –now while you were still safe

before you turned the first page.

And here she is now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shopping for a Name — Raising Our Voices: Womyn Out Loud.

Shopping for a Name — Raising Our Voices: Womyn Out Loud.

I’m not senile—at least, not yet— so let me say I know how Women is spelled  🙂

This is the name of a new group of diverse women who want to —yes— draw attention to ourselves—by hosting literary and musical celebrations of women artists. We want to “bridge the cultural and racial divide” and celebrate diversity through Words and Song.

Here is what I wrote on our group’s website http://ow.ly/4nh1Yf  when we went shopping for a name for ourselves.

“We, women with roots in Palestine, Africa, Italy and India, decided to band together and host a literary reading. Wondering what to call ourselves, we went shopping for a name.

We tried on a lot of outfits. We considered adding pleats, lace, taking the hem up, lowering it. Nothing seemed perfect. When this six word outfit was chosen, I stared at it. Wasn’t the front and back the same? Why repeat the pattern? We voted; I lost.

At last, after years of being silenced, women are rising up against poverty, abuse, injustice and inequality at every level. As a result we are, at best, 5000 miles up Mt. Everest with 14,000 more to go.

And in many countries women are sitting at the base of the mountain, their mouths stuffed with words they are choking on, words they are not allowed to speak.

And then it hit me! Raising our voices isn’t enough! We must get loud. Louder. And still be lady-women lest we be dismissed as unprofessional, lest we taste like sour grapes, lest the respect we worked so hard to earn be swallowed like “a python takes a rat, head first.” (a line from my poem, The Python, Apprentice House, in press.)

There are always reasons for gender inequality. Very good reasons, some would say. Ultimately women must create, carry and birth human kind. How can they be equally productive in the marketplace? This, to me, is the mother of all ironies. And now that the market place is global, such issues have escalated.

Legal or illegal, there’s always a bruhaha about immigrants. Without Senator Fulbright’s vision of establishing travel grants, I would not and could not ever be here. My hair would have turned gray before I could save airfare to the land of milk and honey.

Not a day goes by without gratitude for my home, the one I chose. And yet my bones ache for the one I left behind.
Here’s an excerpt from my poem in Her Skin Phyllo-thin, Finishing Line Press.

Forty Years Later: What I know.

 Let me say this about immigrants
who burrow through the earth,
to swim in rivers whose names they lisp,
Mississippi, Missouri—so many esses, hisses, misses,
the Grand Canyon they fly over with paper wings….
I love the way they step off a plane or boat into a silky twilight
towing belongings—prayer beads, bamboo flutes, jute bags….

Come listen to the rest of this poem and others that I’ll  read on May 15th, 2016 at The Impact Hub, 10 East North Ave, Baltimore, at 2 p.m. Come listen to an amazing group of writers. Come raise your voices with us.

I’m sorry I don’t have a picture of our group, so the pics are all about me and me, and my books.

 

Where is Home?

Although I returned from home #1 (India) some 7 weeks ago, I have only recently begun to feel settled in home #2 (my much-loved city, Baltimore, USA.) This time the trip felt longer and far, far more tiring, which makes little sense since I last went there just 2 ½ years ago. Perhaps, there’s been a speedy continental drift, I told myself, and home #1 had floated further into the Pacific Ocean.

And then it occurred to me. Get real, I told myself. You’re older! Travel takes a toll.

But isn’t age just a number? I’ve heard that so often it’s almost a cliché. In any event, I googled the saying and found a zillion. I chose three to contemplate upon.

Age is just a number and young is an attitude.

Age is just a number. It should never hinder you from accomplishing your goals.

Age is just a number and weed is just a plant.

Well yes, over these many weeks, I’ve amassed plenty of attitude that has not hindered me from being asleep or half asleep both day and night, if that was my goal.

And of course, I know weed is a plant! After all, I have a B.Sc. in Botany for heaven’s sake, which should count for something! My father, a botanist, used to say a weed is a plant that grows where it’s not welcome. If a rose grew in a cornfield, it would be a weed, he would say. Little did my father know that weed also grows where it is warmly welcomed.

With that out-of-the-way, let me write about one of my best friends in India. I visit him whenever I go home. If you’ve read “How Far Away is Far Away?” (scroll down) you’ve met him too. He had travelled to the far end of the street and now he was back “home” tucked in his little shop at the corner where he has worked since I was a teenager.

I was delighted and relieved to see him. As always, I’d taken all my sandals that needed repair to India so my mochi could work his magic. They are too beautiful and unique to discard. I buy them from roadside vendors, who may be here today and gone tomorrow. So, my sandals are irreplaceable. Shoe repair in America essentially involves glue, whereas my mochi sews right through the leather, stitch by stitch, using his coarse well-worn hands and a long, thick needle. No machines, no glue. He uses his feet as a clamp. In fact, whenever I buy pretty sandals in India, he fortifies them for me even though they are brand new. Only then do they nestle in my suitcase en route to America.

I was with my brother when I met him this time. As usual his head was bent, working, while people walked around him on the side-walk. When he looked up, I smiled and asked him if he remembered me. And his eyes just lit up! He smiled his warm toothless smile, nodded, and simply said “Hahn ji” (Hahn means yes. Ji is a form of respect as in Gandhiji.) Then he said in Hindi, “So many days, you didn’t come.”

I was deeply moved. I didn’t expect this old man, who sees hundreds of people walk by everyday to remember me. My brother, who is also his customer, was equally shocked at his memory.

“I didn’t know you were brother and sister,” our mochi said.

There is a Hindi proverb that says, “the heart at rest sees a feast in everything.”  Over the five years that I lived in Bombay before making the U.S. my home #2, and all the years thereafter whenever I returned to India for brief visits, this poor gentle man, who works everyday as if it’s his first day, has been an inspiring example of what life is truly about. He has given me many fold more than I could ever pay him for repairing my shoes. He is as faithful as the sun and the moon. In this transient fickle world he has been a rock! My family aside, he is what home #1 means to me. And why I must keep returning, no matter how far India drifts away.

Below is a poem entitled “From Bombay to Baltimore” taken from my book, Her Skin Phyllo-thin.

FROM BOMBAY TO BALTIMORE

                                  

The Arabian Sea still flecks with fishing boats

like paper toys my father taught me to fold

and float in streams behind our home.

 

My plane, a silver scythe knows no ache,

splices clouds in half like cotton scarves,

shreds and tosses wispy threads afar.

 

Dim one-bulb huts recede, pinpoints of fire flies,

five star hotels shrink to match-box size,

coconut fronds to dainty fans.

 

This time, my heart, quiet and stilled,

leaves behind a billion people, maybe more,

who say their destinies are written on their foreheads.

 

And still I search between continents,

between sky and sky,

between then and now

 

for home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Far Away is Far Away?

Although I was born in Bombay, now renamed Mumbai, the city was never my home. I grew up in small towns along India’s west coast. But it was home to my grandmothers, uncles and aunts, and my parents would take us to India’s Big Apple for holidays.

As a young girl, I would walk past a rain-washed salmon-colored cottage, past the culvert, and past a field where cows grazed on over-grazed grass, and buffaloes stared with big vacant eyes, unperturbed by flies or children running around. Left-over rain water lay in puddles, riddled with mosquito larvae hatching beneath the surface. Occasionally, the government would spray a film of kerosene oil to kill them and prevent malaria outbreaks, but during the monsoons, the mosquitoes won the battle.

Now, when I visit India, nothing is familiar. The stone culvert has been ground down to dust, the streets widened and tarred, the houses, cottages, gardens and trees gone. Instead, tall ten-storied buildings with iron-rimmed balconies, symmetrically spaced and stacked, reach up to the sky. Gardens have been reduced to strips of land with a few coconut trees, flowers and potted plants, bordered with cement bricks. Barking dogs have replaced the silence of napping buffaloes and lolling cows.

But a little ways down the road, there is one thing that doesn’t change—my visit to my mochi, who still mends shoes and sandals by hand, and unapologetically tells his customers to come tomorrow because he will not hurry, not if they want good work, and if they don’t, they should go elsewhere.

My mochi, the cobbler before he moved far away!

I start down Almeida Road where I expect him to be, but he isn’t there. So I walk a little further down the road scanning the pavements on either side, and there he is — in his new digs! It’s a thin plywood board contraption, water proofed with discarded rain coats, strips of gum boot mackintosh, a black umbrella minus the handle, and irregular patches of water proof pliable plastic. It’s very colorful. And there he sits in a space so low that he must bend to enter it, and when he crouches down and crosses his legs to align the soles of his feet, his head almost touches the ceiling. His feet are like a podium for his customer’s shoes; sometimes they are a clamp as he wields a large needle through the leather—-stitch by stitch, as if he has all the time in the world.

“Namaste,” I say, delighted to have found him. “How are you? Do you remember me?”
He nods, joins his hands, smiles a tooth less smile, his deep eyes filled with kindness. But of course, he doesn’t remember. How could he? My hair is short and curly, my face more lined; a few hundred people walk past him everyday. And it has been three years since I came “home.”

“May I take your photo?” I ask him.
He shakes his head, yes, with pure delight. “Can you wait a little?”
“Of course.”
He almost bumps his head against the ceiling as he emerges, and reaches on a tree branch behind him for a blue cotton shirt to cover the vest he wears while working. He uses his palms as if they were an iron, and presses down, on his shirt, over and over, then adjusts his collar, and shakes his head side-to-side to indicate he’s ready.

I take several pictures and show them to him on the LCD display. He smiles, pleased with what he sees. And that seems to trigger a memory, because I’ve taken his picture numerous times—-essentially every time I go home.

“Ah, you don’t live here,” he says. “Where did you go so long?”
I wave my hand toward the sky. “Bahut dhoor,” I say. “Far away.”
“Me, too,” he says. “ Bahut dhoor.”
“Really? Where?” I asked, happy that he could afford to close shop and travel somewhere, perhaps to see the Taj Mahal. It is after all, one of the seven wonders of the world in his (our) country.
He points up the road. “Oodhur,” he says, “There!”
I look to where he points.
“So many years, my shop was there,” he says. “Under a mango tree. Then, they cut down the mango tree. So, now I’m here.”

I feel my eyes filling up with tears. He had travelled far away too, and set down new roots, like I had done when I came to America.

 

Poetry, Science, Art

In the winter of this year, I was honored to serve as the guest editor for the Science issue of Little Patuxent Review.  Until I became a poet and writer, I hadn’t thought much about how similar the process of writing is to conducting scientific research.

Below is an excerpt of prose and poetry I wrote for this remarkable journal.

The poet is to the human condition as the telescope and the microscope are to the scientist.
-V.V. Raman

To this day, I remember the elation on my botany professor’s face when he peered into the microscope at my double stained section of a dicot stem and burst out saying– “Look, here is where art lies. No painter can paint something so beautiful. No words can describe it.” I was fifteen, a freshman in college. What did I know of science or art? I’ve forgotten my professor’s name and his exact words, but never that one moment we shared.

Science has always been an integral part of my life, not only because I love it, but because it was my financial gateway to America.  Without scholarships and grants, the little V-shaped Indian peninsula on which I was born was as far from America as the furthest planet. At home, however, science and literature were, as Thomas Huxley says, two sides of the same coin.

My father was a botany professor; my mother was a geography and social studies teacher. As educators, they simply insisted that my siblings and I “learn” —at first, anything, and later, preferably something that would earn us a living. Asked to choose between science and arts, I chose science, of course, and botany as my major. No surprise there!

Since then, I have worked with viruses, bacteria, cells, tissues, and animals in academic research institutions and in the biopharmaceutical industry, and with young women as a high school science teacher. It was only then, when my summers were free, that I began writing. And that felt natural and complete.

Unfortunately, science seems to be more at odds with poetry than with other literary genres. Sometimes, poems invoke science-based images as metaphors that are incorrect, simplified descriptions of the science itself. Counterclaims that science robs the wonder of the natural world and of life itself, with its cold, formal, scientific methodology are equally rampant. In fact, poetry and science have always had a symbiotic relationship. Consider Erasmus Darwin’s long two-part poem The Botanic Garden (1789) which together total some 3260 lines structured in rhyming couplets with footnotes addressing, among other scientific issues, the beginning of his theory of evolution that his grandson, Charles Darwin, would later amplify.

Ultimately, scientific research and creative writing both seek to understand the mysteries of life (and death) on our own planet and beyond, and certainly in our imagination.

Here is my “science” poem first published in Persimmon Tree, 2012. http://www.persimmontree.org/v2/fall-2012/international-poets/

A Poet’s Calculations
By Lalita Noronha

Paired in vials of cobalt blue media,
they mate, metamorphose in ten days,
specks of eggs hatch squirming larvae,
rice-grain pupae, adult fruit flies.
My students chart sex ratios and the inheritance of traits,
black, round-bodied males, spiny oblong females,
sepia eyes, vestigial wings.
They record data, analyze, calculate gene frequencies.
It’s all done in a month.
My calculations: Should I live to be, say eighty,
a respectable age in these times,
that month of teaching, a thousandth of my life-span,
flew by before I stopped to count butterflies,
or wrote the last line of this poem.

A NEW STAR

   

 On January 28, 2012, I was in Auckland, New Zealand, walking along Manukau Bay (please scroll down to see pictures.) The fiery Pohutakawa Christmas trees, drunk on red wine, were beginning to sober up. A month past Christmas, and they looked dim, cooling down much like stars do. The pied pipers tip toed across jagged black rocks, dipping deep with their slender beaks to fish out delicacies swimming in their orbits. The oyster catchers were standing in formation ready to take off.

That day in 2012 was ethereal. For almost five months, I’d been writing my novel, the third draft, for many hours a day, sitting like a hermit crab in my sister’s basement.  Rarely, did I emerge to take a nice walk along Manukau Bay. My life as a writer felt much like a black hole eating light and turning blacker with each passing day, ripping from their orbits, the planets of my own sanity . Everything I had to give went into this black hole, deep into the caverns of this  project. Yet at the end of the day apparently nothing came out, or at least nothing that an agent has picked up so far (though in all fairness I’ve only recently begun the arduous task of finding one.)

Fast forward to exactly two years later, January 28, 2014. I was at home in Baltimore, Maryland. There was an arctic front marching toward us, wind chill alerts, temperatures in the low 20s, an “iced inner harbor.” Nothing in anybody’s garden dared to bloom. Even the ever greens were re-thinking their determination to stay forever green. Honestly, they whispered, there’s only so much snow any living thing can endure.

And then, from Stamford, Connecticut, my son called to say he and his wife were at the hospital and they would be first time parents before the day was done. Although it wasn’t the predicted day, it was going to be The Day. And please, could I not expect constant updates? Hmm, I thought, would 10 minute breaks in time constitute constancy? It wasn’t a good time to ask.

Whenever I feel helpless, I light candles. It begins with a tea light before the six inch Pieta on my mantel piece and then I move to some block candles around the house. The scent drops my high blood pressure and softens the what-if-what-if voices that send me spiraling toward a black hole. This day in 2014, most certainly, was violating the laws governing the rotation of the earth, as it had thirty-some years ago, when I brought a baby boy, now about to become a Dad, into my own orbit.  Imagining this whole scene from Maryland was traumatic. Being in labor myself would have been preferable, I thought, foolishly. (And no, I couldn’t hop on a train and just show up in Connecticut, lest I be blasted off into space.)

And then, finally, a tiny new star spiraled into orbit. She was  nineteen inches long and weighed 6lb.11oz. She was heartbreakingly delicate.  In the last almost-four months, she’s been gaining speed, mass and volume. She now emits dazzling white light that breaks into colors of the rainbow, and sounds so sweet, she could be a song bird, or a New Zealand tui. But when the sounds change register, the roof of the house almost sails away as Dorothy’s roof did in Kansas.

It is too soon to show her New Zealand’s fiery Pohutakawa trees in December, too soon for her to chase oyster catchers, too soon to see constellations in the Southern Sky, too soon for so much to come. But one January 28, 20–something–we’re going there to Manukau Bay.

(And just between us, her Dad and Mom better not expect constant updates.)

Her Skin Phyllo-thin featured on The Signal with Aaron Henkin

Poems from the new book, Her Skin Phyllo-thin, were featured on WYPR’s radio program, The Signal this Thursday morning. Listen to Aaron Henkin conversation with Lalita here.