Pramila Venkateswaran

BIO

Pramila Venkateswaran, a core member of Women Included, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island (2013-15) and co-director of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Festival, is the author of Thirtha (Yuganta Press, 2002) Behind Dark Waters (Plain View Press, 2008), Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats, 2009), Trace (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Thirteen Days to Let Go (Aldrich Press, 2015), Slow Ripening (Local Gems, 2016), and The Singer of Alleppey (Shanti Arts, 2018). She has performed her poetry internationally, including at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival and the Festival Internacional De Poesia De Granada. She offers poetry workshops in the tri-state area; in addition, she leads a writing-to-heal workshop for breast cancer survivors. An award winning poet, she teaches English and Women’s Studies at Nassau Community College, New York. Author of numerous essays on poetics as well as creative non-fiction, she is also the 2011 Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year.

 

 

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Double Podiai

Since Paradise is a mystery
One has to play with bricks and tiles
Carve wood, stand slabs of floor
On pillars dipped in gold
Always aiming toward the clouds.

With Solomon on our minds
We stepped up to look across the ocean
Westward.

Then slowly shifted our gaze
Upward.

 

Apology

Napalm, the naked child running toward us,
her pain frozen in black and white photographs,
daisy cutters rending mountains, grenades
shearing randomly, the old, the young, women,
children, the armed, the unarmed, the decrepit,
bombs dropping like confetti, hunger raging,
refugees milling along borders, old and new,
children shell shocked, voices muted, spirits stunned,

for all this I am sorry, for I know
I cannot remain disaffected, protected
by routine rolling like tanks, since war
and peace are seldom coincidences,
but carried out in my name, in a country’s
allegiances, choices, attitudes.

Loss, emptiness, want, these are the same
wherever they occur, like joy and abundance,
and these I feel perhaps differently from you
whose house and family have been blown up.
If you cannot hear my apology, then
I have lost, utterly.

 

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