Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Stone by Amitabh Vikram Diwivedi



This evening I would like to welcome Indian poet Amitabh Vikram Diwivedi to The Song Is..  The theme of water has been much on my mind, so I enjoyed reading Prof. Diwivedi's poem on the simple pleasure of skipping stones across a lake.

Stone

Two acts are different:
Hold a flat and skinny stone;
Throw it into the well.
The water splashes and the stone disappears.
But your fingers are rather skillful.
When you hold it in between
And skid it into the lake;
It floats on the surface for a while;
Then the stone breaks it and splashes.
It is not the sound that matters: slosh and slush.
But the ripples move across the body and it expands.
It is love that matters in life, than duty.

Your love lives forever in my memory.

BIOGRAPHY
 
AMITABH VIKRAM DWIVEDI is university faculty and assistant professor of linguistics at Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, India; and author of two books on lesser known Indian languages: A Grammar of Hadoti and A Grammar of Bhadarwahi.
.
His Hindi poetry collection titled Chinaar kaa Sukhaa Patta (trans. Dried Leaves of Chinar) is a notable contribution to contemporary Hindi poetry. He has published around 100 poems in different anthologies, journals, and magazines worldwide. Recently, his poem “Mother” was included as a prologue to Motherhood and War: International  Perspectives (Eds.), Palgrave Macmillan Press. 2014. 

I keep seeing recommendations for Lou Donaldson's The Natural Soul, so I am going to post a link to that album's first cut, "Funky Mama."  It seems to be a nice, fun summertime song:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4tIhsfcxyM

He also did a version of "Love Walked In" on this album:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4BmHUg8Cwk

I'll finish with his version of "People Will Say We're in Love":  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGio2MFjYaY



2 comments: