Woman Evolving

Woman Evolving

After reading Tishani Doshi

I have walked through the ages, infant earth suckling at my breast.

Unfazed by skies peeling their skins in interglacial storms and time warps,

I have skinned woolly mammoths that make history with their tusks; the altered

states of my half woman, half animal consciousness, its pulsing rhythm

etched with knapped tools on furrowed cave walls. Habitually humming,

I have hunted and gathered the remains of fleeing epochs in my womb.

Then God was a woman carrying the world in her dark womb,

faceless Venus, voluptuous stone spirit, my alter ego, walking abreast.

I, her first shaman, the notes of pre-historic wind whistling, humming

through my paleolithic bones; I drummed trances on time warped

animal skins and swayed wildly to some hominid mating rhythm;

a primordial archetype, mutating through the eons, waiting to be altered.

Threshing grain, setting stones in zeitgeist, my anatomy un-altered,

I poured my soul and cast my primeval self in many a baked clay womb,

copper thigh and bronze bosom. The lilting cadence of my heart’s rhythm

sculpted by time, I, Artemis, bearing the weight of my teeming breasts,

suckled the centuries that slept in foetal form in the time warps

of a planet that evolved with me, falling, rising, humming

the music of celestial spheres. Like many bees humming

in hives, I moved with others along meandering rivers, altering

the history of the world, birthing civilisations in time warps;

civilisations that I cradled in my arms and in my dark womb.

In stone courtyards, in citadel baths, I frolicked, with heaving breasts.

Carrying the sperms of the sky, I pirouetted to the cosmic rhythm

that tinkled in the bone bangles around my shoulders. My inner rhythm

radiant in aureate notes, as I found in the earth’s core humming

mines of gold. Worshipping fiery Kali, with lolling breasts,

I the shaman, reincarnate in a state of eternally evolving, altered

psyche, selling my supple body and fecund golden womb

to the highest bidders in street corners, never time-warped.

Deified and defied in paintings, sculptures and mind-warped

pornography, a martyred goddess, I yearn to reclaim my lost rhythm,

only to realise that the business of the world begins and ends in my womb.

Wrapping myself in myth, I walk again, stroking the air, humming

a new song, mothering generations of martyrs to save nations altered

by wars. I stand at the crossroads of centuries, hope in my breast.

in the maze of time warps, I am tired of walking, humming;

I want to write a brave new rhythm, write a brave new world altered

in my overflowing womb, write a brave new weltanschauung on my breast.

Neglect

Neglect is an abandoned well singing

the derelict song of dead water,

the croaking of frogs wallowing

in the sludge of self-pity; the sniggering

of undercurrents that have stopped

irrigating the heart. Neglect is a ghost,

a soul in torment, the eerie boom

of the bittern at twilight; the anguish

of wind trapped in caverns, gasping in

the dark. Neglect is a deserted shrine,

a stone idol banished to the wilderness,

sans candles, sans flowers, sans incense;

a lost god betrayed by man. Neglect is

a poem, written with grey skies in mind.

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About the Poet:

Usha Kishore is an Indian born British poet, translator and editor, resident on the Isle of Man. A former English teacher, she recently completed a PhD in Postcolonial Poetry with Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. Usha is the author of three poetry collections, the latest being Immigrant (Eyewear London, 2018) and a book of translations from the Sanskrit. She has co-edited an anthology of British Indian diasporic poetry, Home Thoughts (2015). She is also the editor of Sanskrit Literature (in translation) with Muse India. Her poetry is widely published and anthologised. Usha was profiled by Writers Mosaic (Royal Literary Fund) in 2024.