WATSON'S WELL OF ENGLISH UNDEFILED
by G. Viswanathan
You think in English my dear friend
And sing as to the manner born,
For your Muse without stint doth send
Words of all their Indianness shorn.
You seem to belong to Albion,
Whose tongue in sweetness you spell-bind
And heave it up to fount Helicon
In melodic sip enshrined.
You will sure drink it to the lees
When no more an eaglet in the skies,
You ride the Pegasus with ease
To blow with its hoof without sighs
The spring in the unsullied mount,
And Hippocrine blushing flows.
Your rhythm, rhyme and metre don't
Stray debauched in your cadenced lays.
They are thoughts combined with music,
melodic strains sans strain or trick,
Pulsing ever, knowing no hearse.
You have done well them to rehearse.
THE STINT...
by Jayashree Lakshminarayanan
Morning nine, the seating were reshuffled
Just the day, I had to spend in a hall
Hall so big it could accommodate 50,
But for the day, it was all mine.
Just me and my table and my comp
'No phone', said the electrician,
Or internet or even the LAN.
'Oh' I said, with a sigh,
'My lucky day', said my heart within.
A strong wooden door shut me from the world
The world so noisy and I don't care.
'Tis a Saturday, I planned to fudge
Transcending into a world of mine
That was when I read your poems,
One by one, each one of them.
Rocking Pegasus and the Tinai
An Eaglet In The Skies and more of you
Call it jealousy or by any other name,
I spell a curse, on what I read
Not for the words, that you have
But for the words that I lost.
Three years ago, I lost my treasure
The vault of my thoughts and of my childhood
My Simple poems and silly lines
And Thought of wisdom that brimmed me over
Of the tree I wanted to hug,
Of the uphill drive to Tirupathi,
Lines I wrote in the exam hall,
When I was totally out of answers
Quotes that often struck me hard
Of Gandhi, of Shakespeare, and the umpteen lot
The contexts are stamped in my heart
But the words are gone with the book
I swore never to vault again
For the loss was painful to go over again
The memory had been ever afresh
But the voices have gotten distant
Until I read your poems that day
Never had I known what I had lost
Thanks Mr.Watson for all your words
They just made me a perfect day.
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