Project Description
Mona Dash
Born and brought up in Orissa, India, Mona Dash moved to London in 2001.
As an Engineer and MBA, she works as a manager in a Telecoms company. She writes short stories and poetry and her work has been published in various magazines internationally such as Kavya Bharati, Muse India, The Lake, Poetry 24, 3 Elements, Dhauli Review, to name a few. Her work has also been anthologised in Suvarnarekha , Dance of the Peacock from India , Foreign Flavours, Foreign Encounters and other recent anthologies.
She is currently working towards a M.A in creative writing in the London Metropolitan University.’ Dawn-drops is her first collection of poetry published by Writer’s Workshop, India. Her first book of fiction is represented by Redink Literary agency.
www.monadash.net
The Immigrant’s song.
When it rains here
In this country, with its dark earth and green gardens;
sometimes the flecks of rain
caress the earth just like in the dusty Indian plains,
and as fresh waters merge in the hungry soil,
it smells like when the clouds break and its monsoon
in India, the heat of the plains dissolving in the waters.
The smell of long ago, the smell of home.
And suddenly, this country with its different skies
roses in the summer, rain in the winter
feels like home.
Shiva
Creator, destroyer, passive, fierce
Contradictions live in you, mirroring perhaps
the world around, praying to you –
A giver of boons, of wishes,
indiscriminately perhaps.
Your devotees surround you
Snakes coiling, ashes, unwashed ascetic
Power, intensity, the Lord of the Dances.
Images of you from childhood.
You live here as well, in this country
even in this antiseptic calmness.
In these pretty well ordered gardens,
there is sometimes a glimpse of a tail
of the King slithering, or an angry thunderstorm,
a harbinger of your fierce dancing.
Sometimes the sun scorches here, and the floods
remind one of the Destroyer in you.
And it’s comforting to see
whether in anger or in calmness
The Shiva in this land as well.
To know the all-pervading
everything of Shiva here, as in that
distant Himalayas bound land.
By Mona Dash