A little baffling it’s, a bit insane
and funny too, this whole God-farm affair.
You sow invisible seeds in ghostly plain
and wait for hallowed rains through silent prayer!
You wait and wait to reap the grain; but lo
one season runs one long lifetime, if not
few births more flow, like melting silver floe,
and seems a bilking taste the grist you sought.
There’s drought sometimes, wilting the crop and oft
a great deluge rotting your pious essay!
It’s whence, you must but keep your spirits aloft,
a firm alp like in brutal twister’s sway!
Mind you, the pain itself is blissful gain
and shed each shred of spirit, a sacred grain.
Once an advocate, Sathya Narayana joined the Government of India as Inspector of Salt in 1984 and received two service promotions. In May 2014, he took voluntary retirement as Superintendent of Salt.
A well-crafted and beautiful sonnet, Sathya. You have certainly captured the changing environmental situation on this ‘God-Farm’ we know as Mother Earth with eloquence. Imagery of monsoon rains, and drought and twister storms, so immersed in our ‘silent prayer!’ God Bless!!
Really like that final line and the ‘and shed each shred of spirit’ – so mellifluous. Well done.
I agree about this particular line. “Shed each shred of spirit” sounds great.
However, I also agree with Mr. Anderson that the poem is a struggle to understand, largely due to grammar and syntax that seems incompatible with spoken English. For instance, the lines in the second stanza, “if not… sought”, make little sense to me (or maybe I am just a little daft).
There are a number of individual phrases which sound very nice and make me really want to like the poem, but the thing as a whole is too incoherent.
“God-Farm” with ‘invisible seeds in ghostly plain’ appears to deal with human predicament. One’s efforts to reach salvation may fructify sooner or later or may get destroyed in that attempt which may appear insane or funny to some people. ‘..shed each shred of spirit’ indicates the losing of one’s so called personality which is the way to attain salvation. A great poem from Mr Satya Narayana.
Blessed are they who are poor in spirit.
As “In brutal twister’s sway” you have wrenched regular English into something I must struggle to parse. The grammatical & syntactical infelicities are manifold. You seem to be caught up in the “flow” of ideas without a hint of what it means to provide connective tissue for the musculature that drives your poem. Better punctuation might have made things clearer.
Dear Mr. Anderson, Namaste. Poetry is not prose. Poetry is a field of experimentation, that helps the language to grow, expand it’s range of usage and acquire new glows of beauty and grace. All great poets were insanely unconventional. All the prosodic tinkerings like meter, rhyme, rhythm, inversions etc. are meant to writhe, warp and knot the language into unconventional shapes to bring out new allurements and grandeur to the otherwise routine parlance. I’ve been trying to infuse some Indian idiom and metaphor into the English language. That’s where a little confusion arises. Please bear with me.