In Our Literature Classes

How many stars we touched my friends,

And O yes, the ocean deeps we explored!

Flew through galaxies

Danced through forests

Became rivers and winds

Volcanoes and earthquakes

Hurricanes and cyclones

Fire and flood, we turned into.

Burning summer sun-like, in fury, wisdom, pain

Pouring down rain-like, gentle and deluge

Sometimes life-giving, sometimes all-ending.

We, warmth and joy and quiet patience -

Celebrating frozen winter

Befriending snowstorms

Awaiting spring.

Spring buds and birds we always were,

My children!

Full of life and promise,

Beauty and hope,

And the undying music of life,

In our literature classes.

Living the stories we read

Consuming characters

Embodying emotions

Fighting for ideas.

Tagore and Shakespeare

Emerson and Tennyson

Keats and Yeats

Achebe and Anand

Ngugi and Narayan

Toru and Kamala.

Spenser’s sweetness, Donne’s sharpness, Milton’s magnificence

Dryden, Pope, Swift, Orwellian satire unsurpassed

Marlowe and Shelley, passion personified.

Wordsworth the prophet, Keats the artist

Bacon’s hammer blows of wisdom

Lamb’s silken tugs of nostalgia.

Jane Austen, first queen of innocent romance

Bronte sisters - daughters of fury, sorrow and piercing love.

Burns lost in love’s red, red roses

Blake and Gray in the afterlife

Coleridge romancing ghosts

Byron and Shelley tearing tradition apart.

Arnold, ever critical moralist

Browning, optimistic psychologist.

Yeats and Eliot voicing voiceless post-modernity

Owen, Graves, Larkin, Brecht warring war

Beckett, Pinter, Sylvia Plath, Camus

Inhabiting depths of despair

Conrad exposing our deep darkness.

Ibsen, Shaw, Golding and our very own Karnad

Blinding brilliance of ideas

Thomas Hardy fighting our fate

Dickens awakening our dead conscience.

Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood

Stunning feminine glory.

Great American song of humanity -

Whitman, Longfellow, Miller, O’Neill,

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Henry James.

Emily Dickinson, lover of death, philosopher of the tiny

Poe, O’Henry - story-tellers for all times

Langston Hughes, Alice Walker - Afro-American pride

Toni Morrison - priestess of the Black Goddess

Wole Soyinka, African lion in

Gordimer’s Afro soul.

Sarojini’s nightingale melodies

Ramanujan’s acidic satire

Manto and Attia burning in partition sagas

Khushwant’s Singh all-encompassing vastness

All kinds of prose -

Gandhi’s and Kalam’s utility, Aurobindo’s spirituality

Radhakrishnan’s philosophy, Nehru’s and Tharoor’s elegance

Vivekananda’s and Ambedkar’s revolutionary zeal.

Soul’s staple food

in Narayan’s Malgudi

and Bond’s Mussorie.

Women showing women the way –

Sahgal, Desai, Deshpande

Roy and Divakaruni

Ismat Chughtai and Maya Angelou.

Rushdie, Naipaul, Mistry, Ghosh - rebellious cosmopolitans

O the fire of our vernacular -

Kalidasa to Tagore to Bankim to Pritam

Bharati to Gorakhpuri, Iqbal to Dhasal

Tendulkar to Vijayan and Ananthamurthy

Our fiercely brilliant women - Goswami, Mahaswetha, Volga.

Whoever loved like Neruda or Rilke or Marquez?

Or spoke suffering like Sophocles or Tolstoy or Gorky

Or rhymed sorrow like Jayanta Mahapatra?

Thoreau, Ruskin, Raja Rao

Arun Joshi, Noam Chomsky

Navigating ethical oceans.

Sartre, Said, Ahmad and Guha,

Spivak and Bhabha, Fanon, Senghor

Grilling the white man, singing the subaltern soul.

Curnow and Hope and Wright –

Great South soul searchers.

Vikramasimha, Naheed, Nasreen,

Dharker, Diop -

Lanka, Pakistan, Africa,

Incurable rebels all,

From Valmiki to Dhasal

Bama and Ao and Dai

Painting the invisible East -

Dalits, Brown Women, Tribes.

We became all of them

And more than them

Daring to dare them.

Riding on the crests of the tallest minds

Diving into the depths of the deepest souls

We marvelled at and tried to be

All that a human could be.

Imagination stopped where we began

Creativity struggled, pacing our racing hearts

Revolution loved us like a crazed lover

We rebelled more than rebellion.

Religion to Faith

Mysticism to Spirituality

We blossomed

Strength to strength

Rising above and beyond,

Universal and sub-atomic.

What could I teach you

My children?

I could only show the path.

You travelled,

Lived, laughed, wept,

Until

You returned

To show me new things

On my old paths,

And new paths

Never ever dreamt of.

And then I knew

I had made,

An eternal mark,

Somewhere,

Upon the universe.

-      From ‘A Poet’s Promise’ by Rositta Joseph, Black Eagle Books, USA, 2025