Credit@Beryl Peters Collection/Alamy
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Pandora’s Box
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Summer burns like brain fever,
autumn the cold sweat drenching
the sheets and winter dead as an epoch,
with its mammoths and Sabre toothed tigers.
We are treading over them, have built
Edifices which tower like their tusks
and smell like this Holocene too is at
the cusp of its nihilism.
Fires are flogging without weight of a
Whip but dwelling blows as red as the welts
on tender skin. The winds have blown
the hymens of the sacred places and waters
let in and out of dams of abundance.
We are swimming like fishes till we evolve
Into gilled piranhas striking each other dead,
drifting ruthless for survival of the fittest.
Then we remember the lady made out of clay,
bestowed with beauty and forked tongue and
eschew from equating her to women though
some do for her curiosity and guile.
And from the box, a gift of god she was told
to open not, they say, she set all these demons
free, epidemics and calamities and there
she locked it just in time.
So hope still held captive. As we continue to
hold it so it clings back, symbiotic, a prisoner
of the pyrrhic war and we go to sleep in
all the pandemonium of a shrinking globe
and yet resurrect and
Hold the morning paper to our face shielding
the sun with its unfiltered rays, slowly eating us,
we take chunky bites of news and savor the flavor
on our inured tongues, pretending they are stories
from a parallel universe.
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To the Avian Dreams
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Cronus is eating his sons, down here in America to be invincible.
So all the children of this land are flying upwards, defying gravity.
Dreamers are born. They are obsessed with Icarus and
his wax wings
will not be the undoing of the modern day avian art of Daedalus.
We have better appendages now. Like poets we are rising
above the grime
to sublimity to other world of pagan gods where there
is of course a lyre
to wake the trees and stones from their slumber. Like Orpheus, we enchant
with guitar instead such that the third eye is opened to possibilities in midst
of barrenness and dryads come out to shock and dance on
the Florida sands.
Yet some still try to walk away instead of fly, trekking with their backpacks
filled with hopes if there be any left, oblivious to death approaching them
with headlights and fumes. They wave a good bye to dreams,
strawberries and distant memory of golden sunset filled
lands.
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Akshaya Pawaskar is a doctor practicing in India and poetry is her passion. Her poems have been published in Tipton Poetry journal, Writer’s Ezine, Efiction India, Ink drift, The blue nib, the punch magazine, Awake in the world anthology by Riverfeet press and few anthologies by lost tower publications. She had been chosen as ‘Poet of the week’ on Poetry superhighway in 2016, featured writer in Wordweavers poetry contest and second place winner of Blue nib chapbook contest.
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North of Oxford 