Thursday, 28 of March of 2024

Tag » Ravi Shankar

Maya Khosla – Yielding to the Call

Maya Khosla“Maya Khosla was raised in India, England, Algeria, Burma, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. Those cultures as well as her background in biology strongly shaped her writing.

Her first full-length poetry manuscript Keel Bone won the 2004 Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize.

While working for the National Park Service, she completed Web of Water, a creative nonfiction manuscript which was accepted for publication by the Golden Gate National Park Association Press in 1997. Poetry remains her favorite genre.

She has been published in Americas Review, Poetry Flash and Seneca Review and was an artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 1998.” From: Indivisible: A Contemporary Anthology of South Asian American Poetry


In answer to falling light, to genetic unity,
a current soars up, west: monarch butterflies
by the thousand. Not waiting to be shown
the way back. And this isn’t “the way back.”

This shimmering across half a continent’s
air thermals, this gold distance we call migration—
a misnomer—it was not they who ventured
east into the updraft seasons ago, but great-

grandparents. Who are calling to them now
of course. Beckoning day and night
from the sun’s intensity on river and schist,
from the fission-eyes of stellar matter

arranged like a cambered draw in the dark.
And the monarchs yield to the call.
Charged with hybrids of red and gold
their wings stay blurred with a flight

that is so much about turbulence and fury,
about mind over wind-cloud,
that it is less butterflies in flight
than the hurrying of a black-veined river,

less a wing-beaten conglomeration
of airborne probabilities than electric gale,
less mass migration than a cappella
more ancient than decision itself.

First printed in POEM Magazine
–Maya Khosla


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