Ode to earthquake

What a day you chose, Grandma mine!
To quake, to move, to shiver, to shake,
Thereby to ravage, to savage, to shatter,
The celebrations of Mother India Republic Day.
A female snake eating her own children!
Are deaths made in heaven as marriages are?
What bad karma those school children had done?
What configurations of the planets took place?
In the natal charts of those thousands killed?
Million years ago you jolted and rocked.
Opening up the Atlantic and creating the Indian Ocean,
Delinking India from Africa and Sri Lanka.
Those oceans are widening and the Pacific shrinking,
Will the Americas and Asia drift into each other?
The twelve plates mate and hate each other,
Caribbean to Cocos and Indian to Eurasian.
Your wanton ways to be taken as blessing in disguise?
Your natural acts as great levelers? Or
HE made the world to fit best to create and destroy!

^

Biography

Born on 30-9-1935 at Dwarka, Gujarat State, India Ram Mehta had been a professor and head of the Department of English language and Literature in an Arts college for 32 years. He visited France on a cultural mission in 1989 and presented a small kit of Moliere's play in Paris.

He is always on the move from India to North America after retirement in 1994.
He was selected in 2001 and 2002 as a semi-finalist by the International Society of Poets, MD, USA for his four poems IRIS, ODE TO EARTHQUAKE, NIAGARA AND SONNET WRITTEN IN OPTIMIST PARK. The poems are published in the two volumes NATURE'S ECHOES & THE SILENCE WITHIN. Iris & Niagara are on compact Disc (CD) THE SOUND OF POETRY.

He attended the World Congress of Poets at Romania and he is a life member of WCP. His poems are published in the World Anthology of Contemporary Poets. His poems are published in Poetry Magazine, New York and Tintota, Australia and on many online magazines.

He attended the 4th Encuentro Internacional Literario at Montevideo, Uruguay in April, 2003.