Anandi Sharan

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Giving and receiving

Giving and receiving is
a matter of systems-logic.
Listen to the poets!
Here it is,
metabolising civilisation.
Is it not time
to make love?
The rest is not in our control.
It is up to the system.
I once had a mad life
and was bound to
philosophise to
get through the day.
Hard to tell
whether I had something to say,
let alone write about in poetic form
for those who came after.
Now I  think
the system is its own subject and makes us all poets.

Oceans metabolise it,
winds, the weather,
the heat, the deserts,
the rocks, the fungii,
the plants metabolise it,
and break it down.
In and of its self
what we are going through
is nothing but
its own process of breaking down.
Mind and matter
becoming more
manageable.

In my life,
for something to happen
something else must give up.
Ask me again,
say mother and father,
when Anandi is dead.
Ready for life and death,
catastrophic events
at the nanoscopic level
carry off civilisations.
Words clatter and bring us together,
meaning upon meaning
of well-meaning
Attempts at decoding
for well-being,
for heeding.

Having put a tale of
well-spun time
on the table,
here a performance,
there a poem,
I look around, and see
the process
of what I hold dear,
and say,
it is surely, well and truely,
being metabolised.
Broken down into parts
by the weather.
I too am a cloud.
I am its water.

Someone started,
someone continued,
someone ended,
another began.
And being human,
someone remembered.
The forest is all-giving,
there is no tilling,
some things thin,
some grow fatter.
There is abundance,
and every being is a
store of goodness.

Serving time
and space,
the forest too is
a realm of imaginings
of a system without end.
Metabolised love.
The events of time
come all on their own.
It is people
that seem to preserve me
from the system’s harsh glory.
Each being networked,
and rolling over,
gently,
alone,
perfectly together,
at its appointed place.
Circles of imaginings
Some doing this,
some that.
In this place where there is no
me,
I am simply a conduit
of this systems-logic.
the giving and receiving
thing…
a time and space
of immense happenings..
occasionally
taking the round about long way
and occasionally the short way
for  giving and receiving
again and again.
See here,
the system thanking itself!
And me a happen stance
witness.

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Anandi Sharan was born in Switzerland and educated at the University of
Cambridge. Anandi lived in Karnataka villages for many years, and now lives
in Bangalore where  she works on trying to find the best money system to
help people adapt to climate change especially in India.

Anandi Sharan
1 Kempapura Road
Bangalore 560024
Karnataka
India