Ear to the Ground

Of Gods and Goddesses

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about myth-making, religions, and various deities. I saw a Cannabis strain called Blue God. It made me think of Krishna, the Hindu blue god and flute player, and lover. Before the BJP’s Hindu nationalist agenda, this image of the blue god was one I always found to…

Ringing the Bell on Facial Palsy

An essay on the long-term effects of permanent facial palsy.

The Haiku Way

Is that your face I see? Or an old map of travels we took, each alone? Bussing the Sierra Madre, two travellers homeless, dreaming of return. River beside us sand beneath our flip-flopped feet men we did not know All haiku and artwork, Copyright Kaushalya Bannerji, 2019

Traveller’s Lament

I used to love the roads as well as blood loves vein fleeing from running to the geographies of other maps where my race charted like a cartographer’s fantasy finds itself obscured by the deviance of our desire in all my darkness i have never lost the way nor forgotten the words of this lamentation…

Signs of Disorder

the new season eats us with raw uncertainty even this weather has us guessing night’s frost a riddle chancing upon a newspaper a little bit of history intrigues between the fullstops lives collapse and transform nations turn upon themselves jobs are lost wars won and all our dreams made homeless everywhere there are signs of…

Blood in the Fire: A Cry from the Amazon

I’ve been aghast but not surprised to hear about the devastation of the Amazon due to uncontrolled fires set throughout mainly Brazilian territory. I don’t think fire will respect borders either. I’ve been remembering my own experience visiting the Amazon, a place that had always seemed magical and exotic due to the vast amount of…

Skintalker!

These haiku are inspired by music from the 1940s onward. I used to love listening to “latin jazz” and afro-cuban jazz. Years ago, when I had a radio spot, finding music to share was a delight, especially since it was long before the Internet! Chano Pozo revolutionized American jazz at a time when it was…

Rainbow/Arco Iris

The colour Red is a bird with wings that shine. Yellow, turns into a sunflower. Grey, the colour of rainy afternoons when bodies love. Green, hope yet unreachable. Blue, the clear melody that cleanses everything in its wake. Pink, the tongue of a black cat. And Black, the open arms of night, although no-one, but…

Be Like Water

(Kaushalya Bannerji, 2019) flow, like water wave, like water cry, like water rage, like water rain, like water dry, like water still, like water one drop, like water becomes many.

The cat went here and there and the moon spun round like a top (W.B Yeats)

Cats are amazingly complex creatures. Beautiful, predatory, cuddly, inquisitive and also experts at being lazy. Our cat often enjoys the evenings outside and the moon with me. What her shining eyes see only she knows…

Deportee

The day brings so much more news about ICE, the U.S.Border Patrol, family separation, the dependency of multi-billion dollar corporations on undocumented labour and racism. The buying of citizenship (U.S.A) and the ban on migrants who receive social assistance from becoming citizens (Germany). And in the midst of these conditions, people still love and live,…

Strange Fruit: Death and Democracy in the United States

This brief essay looks at the change in racist violence over the last century, making links between state and non-state actors.

More Haiku!

Loving the haiku today! What a fantastic form. I thought I would share the classics. Here is my favourite, the tender and whimsical Kobayashi Issa: O snail Climb Mount Fuji, But slowly, slowly! Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) is another great haiku master: I want to sleep Swat the flies Softly, please. After killing a spider, how…