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Best Poems Written by Vidya Raghunathan

Below are the all-time best Vidya Raghunathan poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Vidya Raghunathan Poem

Money

Money is better than barter
Money is better than share
Money takes you further than you dare
Though hands,  not money built my walls
Hands put together materials to paint my hall
Metals I dug came before all.

I fell in love with my money
Though the kitchen fire was lit by my honey
Her hands weaved into mine ever-ready
My family was all of four
For our morning bread, my wife rolled the nightly dough
By mid-morning I was always rolling in dough.

My pockets filled with money
Heart heaving heavy with pleasure
But my real heart had slipped into my belly
Pick pockets saw my rich resources
Bankers saw my various bulges
All overlooked my face coloured by insatiable desires.

Hope is real not just a hypothesis
Family is special but not essential
Beyond my reach was whomsoever I thought special
My hands guide me to the alchemist's hole
To unearth facts I crawl into their safe-hole
Here my soul and heart turned to pure gold.

Pickpockets, bankers, wife and relatives all lived till very old
My money was in their hold
They forgot me eventually but not too soon
I came one day as a mendicant to their door
They were ready for an ordinary life like before
Their look of wantonness I had to ignore.

I will lie to be buried not burnt
I will not rise again penny-wise
With me I will entomb money-culture's vice.

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Last Night

Five summers past, Varkala was to be a geopark
Three of us today are walking its streets in the dark.

Between buildings and trees are hidden birth rocks
Of a vulnerable cliff,

We are hunting for the cinnamon bush lark
Who have found a new habitat on these soft sedimentary rocks.

To save Varkala, we drew out a chart
With dots to show where to place garbage and dumps
With pointers to not dig the cliff,

On the slopes we drew lines to demark
From where water should drain down
Leave the cliff as before, dry and stark.

We hope to find out land's birthmark
After we give Varkala a bright new start.

Details | Vidya Raghunathan Poem

Birthday Wish

Who is interested in this tale?
They know you eat fish
You on occasion laugh but seldom smile
You always make a birthday wish
For wellness and fullness
Of people with want and need
Standing at the temple gates
Where gargoyles stare down in seeming greed.
The best and biggest smiles are under these gates
In faces which are varied caricatures of fate
This is the most famous of all gates
Ambaal fed me here just enough
Then she read my writings on the slate.
It is a temple and a state
Where mind matters and inner self dominates
Citizens speak of the ruling laws
Allowing barriers of expression to break.
Here you will not see lazy loitre
Freedom of spirit here is graded backwards
Making children and illusory clutter
Exchange of energies between child and aged occur.
This temple tale of my existential flavour
Is a mix of right and wrong ingredients
Made of coveted thoughts and odd behaviour
In the long run functional alltogether.

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The Gold Medal

No No! He said but twice in his life
It took him away from place of strife.

I ran around the field searching
For him who understood what I had been saying.

Be had had ended his journey at the very top
The icy cold place which in past had him stop.

Challenge is compelling in sport
Most fall in their journey to one spot.

Reconcile in peace cast in Gold
Search on for there isn't just one truth.

In control, in withdrawl and inner silence
There lurks a fountain source of guidance.

Make a mirror of this substance
Look in it for energy for your existence.

Life is precious but living is its consequence
You can, with just a mirror of reverence.

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Tigress

She was a tigress but not cruel
Her long uniform stripes to some distasteful
She chose to display it grandly
For to such a life she was grateful.
She chased her prey in play
She also preyed to kill
Her stripes never changed colour
But some thought one day it will.
In her life there was good and evil.
Let me rewind to what had come to pass
Her cubs she fed to their fill
Each day a new flavour till one day...
She left them at the dead elephant carcass
Before the mid-morning heat she was gone
At water's edge the cubs kept playing till dawn
Many players came there thirst drawn
Amongst them the cubs learnt to carry on.
For she was a tigress of wilderness not culture born.

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Sunny Moon

Into my yoga room she came with a half moon
The sun burnt it, she said
For the moon dared to show in the afternoon
Her distress equalled the moons
Her tears, when they came, could fill a water balloon
I distract her with pictures in cartoons
Of animals and birds cooling down in the monsoon
Just then raindrops fell on her sketchbook
Filling her teacup with rain, I hand out a spoon
Thus, she stopped crying for the moon.

Details | Vidya Raghunathan Poem

Butterfly

UNSUPPORTED CODE 
The butterfly chaser was two years old and two feet tall
The blue shoes on her feet mattered to her most of all
On it she could squat all day long
Sitting on them she inspected the moist soil
Where the Mynah had just run along
She did find footprints, delicate and small
She sat drawing on the mud with fingers and nails
Where the garden sweeper had left her a large clean spot
She pretended deaf to all the common sounds
She was the silent knower of right and wrong.  UNSUPPORTED CODE

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Blue Pine

A slow unravelling of features
And personality on the mountain slopes
By play between clouds and Sun
Two hours of matchless play
My heart in a body paralyzed
Such is a place I came to stay.

At the very edge of vision on a mountainscape
Silky white sheets of snow on display
I cannot make out the colours of today
Somewhere the menancingly dark
Nearer me a downy grey
I wondered what ahead lay.

The covers came over and down all day
Pine trees never to be sun-burnt
Deforestation to aforestation
Many many young pine tree plantations
Roots lying exposed on damaged earth stations
Pining baby pines

21st century victims of re-exploitation.

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Love During Covid

Day brightens
Resplendant Laburnum buds are glowing
Still an unquiet morning
An ornate chandelier blazing
While the SUN is hiding
And a disease re-emerges
Prolonging months of grieving
Pyre unstoppable
Tik Tok Covid
Tango of the dead and living.

Details | Vidya Raghunathan Poem

Connections

An unrisen Sun has power —
Rays unsuitable to the day-world break the night cover
The Sun is brighter and stronger without sunlight
Some other things to do with the Sun too are a misnomer
It matters not if I see him leave at the end of prayer
He always returns to be a brief companion
To do which he has mountains to maneuver
They do aarti to the Ganga and him too
Pure orangeness of setting Ganga shares
It is her nature to love her beholder
He is her viewer and she his waiter.