With Apologies to the Nakshatras

This is my second entry for Global Poetry Writing Month (GloPoWriMo). I am not sure if I will be reproducing that poem here.

This was the prompt given on the NaPoWriMo website:

And just as many songs do, the poem directly addresses a person or group – in this case, the Muses. Taking (Anne) Carson’s translation as an example, we challenge you to write a poem that directly addresses someone, and that includes a made-up word, an odd/unusual simile, a statement of “fact,” and something that seems out of place in time (like a Sonny & Cher song in a poem about a Greek myth).

I wanted to see a parallel in Indian poetry. I stumbled on an article of translations of medieval Indian poetry. There is one that I particularly liked:

svārthārambhapraṇataśirasāṃ pakṣapātāt surāṇāṃ
dṛptātmānaṃ karajakuliśair dānavendraṃ nihantum |
siṃhībhūtas tribhuvanaguruḥ so ‘pi nārāyaṇo ‘smin
rāgadveṣapratihatamateḥ kasya na syāt paśutvam ||

Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59

The author, Anand Venkatkrishnan, translates it as:

When the gods (to whom he was partial)
started bowing to him
to save their own heads,
even Nārāyaṇa, the guru of all,
turned into a lion
to slay the proud demon-king
with his pointy fingernails.

I mean, if you were so
swayed by love and hate,
you’d become an animal too.

Translation of Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59, Anand Venkatkrishnan

A search for Sūktimuktāvalī shows that it is an anthology of poems commissioned by Jalhana. I looked up the original text and found it on the Internet Archive.

I tried to find more by the writer than the four articles he wrote for The Revealer. I found a Tumblr account in his author bio. However, he has not updated it since 2020. He seems to be currently at the Divinity School in the University of Chicago.

He has written a book on the Bhagvata Purana and about scholarly life in India. I like it’s opening lines:

We often talk about the life of the mind as if it were the mind that mattered, when it’s really the life.

Anand Venkatkrishnan, Love in the Time of Scholarship

The book is an open access publication made available online [PDF link] by the University of Chicago.

I realise now that this post has not been about the poetry I wrote about 45 minutes ago, giving it a lot of thought but not really satisfied with the output. Not yet.

In short, the poetry is about the story of the Nakshatras and the Moon. Modern science posits these asterisms at different points in space and time. I tried but have not been fully successful in adding all the suggestions in the prompt.