Ode on Bicycle

 

       Volume - 1                             Issue -3                     April 2025     

Ode on Bicycle

Beneath the sun, a two-wheeled steed awaits,

Its chrome curves gleaming, eager to explore,

A frame of bones where motion orchestrates,

The pedals hum a tune we can’t ignore.

It carries dreams on spokes that slice the air,

A compass forged from handlebars and chains—

A silent friend who knows the roads we dare.

 

Through winding lanes where dappled shadows play,

It dances, light as laughter, swift as wings,

The wind conspires to steal our breath away,

As asphalt blurs to streams of fleeting things.

We climb the hills where gravity complains,

Then plummet, hearts unbound, to valleys low—

The earth becomes a song, the ride, refrains.

 

From cobbled paths where history still breathes,

To neon streets where city pulses race,

It bears the weight of commuters and wreaths

Of childhood joy—first freedoms we embrace.

A student’s grind, a merchant’s laden cart,

A wanderer’s escape to distant skies—

The bicycle, a kaleidoscope heart.

 

No fuel but strength, no voice but spinning gears,

It scoffs at haste, yet charts the quickest course.

A relic turned revolution through the years,

It threads the world with purpose and resource.

So praise this steed, both humble and divine,

Whose wheels, like time, turn past and future near—

A circle’s grace, where all our journeys twine.

               

              - Sivakumar Raman

                           -        

Elegy for Thirst: A Plea to the Polluters

 

         Volume - 1                             Issue -2                     March 2025     

Elegy for Thirst: A Plea to the Polluters

The rivers once sang in crystalline tongues,
Their currents a hymn where the heron had sprung.
Now bottles and wrappers choke their blue throats,
Asphalt and poison seep into their notes—
Will we heed the dirge of the waters unsung?

The pond was a mirror for dragonfly wings,
A cradle for lilies, a wellspring for springs.
Now sludge paints its surface, a greasy disguise,
Plastic confetti where minnows once rise—
What ghosts will drink from the ruin we bring?

The lakes held the moon in a liquid embrace,
Their depths nursed the salmon, their shores carved with grace.
But toxins now ripple like shadows unkind,
A debt left for children we’ve chosen to blind—
Will their parched throats curse us to history’s disgrace?

The oceans, vast vaults where the whales hymn and roam,
Now choke on our hubris, our apathy’s foam.
Microplastics glint where the starfish once clung,
Acid tides rise where the coral was young—
What wars will we wage for a flask of fresh foam?

You, who dump waste where the tadpoles once swam,
Who drain factory filth into wetlands’ sweet dam:
The earth keeps a ledger, each sin etched in mud,
Each choked stream, each poisoned well, each tainted flood—
Your grandchildren’s lips will bleed drought’s bitter jam.

For water is life’s final psalm and first vow,
A relic we’ve squandered—yet demand it now.
When taps cough dust and the skies withhold rain,
No wealth can bribe mercy, no tech rinse the stain—
The future’s cracked cup waits. What choice have we now?

So let the land breathe, let the rivers run clear,
Unstop the choked springs, hold the wetlands dear.
For every drained marsh, a thirst yet unborn,
For every oil spill, a harvest of scorn—
The clock’s ticking liquid. The end hovers near.

Rebuild what you’ve broken. Let conscience command.
The earth’s veins are bleeding; we hold the last bandage.
Or else, when the last drop is traded and sold,
Our epitaph’s ink will be rust, thirst, and mold—
And the tale of our drowning… will die with the land.

                                                - Sivakumar Raman

“Spectrum of Scars: An Anthem for the Unseen”

 

       Volume - 1                             Issue -2                     March 2025     

“Spectrum of Scars: An Anthem for the Unseen”

Beneath the sun’s indifferent, gilded eye,
we etch our skins with borders—ochre, coal, sienna—
pigments twisted to flags, then fists. History’s loom
weaves night and dawn to chains, dyed deep in marrow.
The earth, once a canvas of unclaimed light,
now parses its children by wavelengths of fear.
Watch how crimson tides rise when bodies collide—
the atlas of us, scarred by latitudes of hate.

They coded our worth in the math of melanin,
auctioned ancestors under HEX values of scorn,
priced souls by the gram in the database glare.
Schools, cells, sidewalks—algorithms of exclusion,
where “diversity” blooms as a corporate mural,
yet hands clutch purses when shadows grow tall.
The ballot, the badge, the gavel’s cold script—
all hue-cracked tools in a masterclass of lies.

You’ve seen the gallery: nooses hung like folk art,
the smirk of a headline that blames the deceased,
a mother’s wail muted to trending hashtag.
They pixelate riots but blur the cause,
reframe the fire as a failure of grace.
The museum of trauma charges admission—
gawk at the relics of breath stolen, spent.
Our grief’s curated, our rage under glass.

But the prism rebels. In the subway’s hum,
a Punjabi hymn tangoes with Bronx rap,
a trans woman’s laugh cracks the binary night.
Street murals bloom where the tanks once parked,
rewriting the concrete with ancestors’ ink.
Each protest chant is a chromatic scream,
scattering shards of the supremacist lens.
The marginalized spectrum refuses to bend.

We’re the ungridded, the riot outside the RGB,
the brown girl who fuses quantum and Qur’an,
the indigenous codebreakers unplugging the west.
Your algorithms can’t cage our crescendo—
we’re tongues of turquoise, vowels of vermilion,
the rogue rays that fracture their sterile white sea.
We name our shades in the teeth of their “norms,”
reclaim the language that sought to erase.

So let the labs of hate spin their pale theories—
we’ll drown their white noise in sunflower bursts,
in the roar of maroon, jade, bronze, and chrome.
The future’s a kaleidoscope we grip like a blade,
each face a frontier, each voice a new dawn.
No pigment is illegal, no lineage denied.
March 21st—we unsilence the spectrum,
and the world, in its blizzard of hues, finally sees.

        -        Sivakumar Raman

A Poem - International Colour Day

 

       Volume - 1                             Issue -2                     March 2025     

International Colour Day

 

The spectrum, split by God’s prismatic knife,
bleeds myths into grids—cerulean, rust, vermillion—
a taxonomy of light dissected for trade.
We name them like orphans, these orphans of fire,
while corporations patent the pulse of dawn,
sell back the sunset in aerosol cans.
The sky, once a covenant, now a logo;
our retinas scroll through branded rainbows.

In caves, ochre hands pressed rebellion on stone—
red not a hue but a verb, a we exist.
Now Pantone codes parse our grief into swatches:
mourning is #2B1B17, rage #FF0F07.
We’ve bartered the aurora for HEX tattoos,
let algorithms mute the bruise of dusk.
What’s left when we filter the wild from our eyes?
A world rinsed of awe, scrolling in grayscale.

Consider the politics of yellow—how saffron
stains both monk robes and riot shields, how gold
gilds temples and oligarchs’ yachts the same.
Turquoise: the scream of glaciers calving to nil,
a cyanide river’s Instagram shimmer.
Even green, that liar, sells us Eden
in plastic-wrapped sprigs. We’re baptized in dyes
that poison the wells where the earth once bled pure.

The screen glows: neon gamuts hypnotize
synapses. We’re moths to the backlit void,
our dreams pixelated, our longing outsourced
to VR sunsets that never burn flesh.
Children point to strawberries, call them #FF4D4D—
language itself unspooling to code.
The moon, that old poet, pales at the glare
of cities hellbent on outshining the stars.

Yet—in the cracks, fugitive colours rebel:
a weed’s violet spite through concrete, the flush
of two faces close in a subway’s dim hush,
the unscripted gradient of decay on fruit.
A street artist sprays midnight back into teal,
a widow dyes her sari the shade of his laugh.
Colour, that anarchist, slips its leash,
revives in the margins where control goes blind.

So let’s sing the unnamed—the tint of regret
after the phone rings dead, the tone of a scar
remembering its wound, the hue that escapes
when grief and grace blend in a mother’s last glance.
These colours resist the cage of the spoke wheel,
drip outside lines, flood the sterile with life.
To celebrate colour is to treason the grid,
to let the untamed spectrum devour the lid.

-        Sivakumar Raman

A Poem - A Symphony for World Poetry Day

          Volume - 1                             Issue -2                     March 2025     

A Symphony for World Poetry Day

When dawn ignites the ink of March’s pen,

And whispers thread through every shore and sphere,

The globe becomes an open page again,

Where syllables like seeds are sown in air.

From ancient chants to verses yet unborn,

The heartbeats of the world in rhyme are worn.

In every tongue, from deserts to monsoon,

The poet’s breath revives the dust of time—

A sonnet carved in moonlight’s tender swoon,

A haiku cradled where the snowpeaks climb.

In Urdu’s grace or Yoruba’s strong hymn,

The pulse of life crescendos, never dim.

From Sappho’s fire to Homer’s boundless seas,

From Li Bai’s moon to Angelou’s fierce rise,

The dead still speak in rustling parchment leaves,

Their truths embossed in constellations’ eyes.

Each stanza built on sorrow, joy, or war,

A bridge of light to realms unseen before.

A child who finds their voice in measured lines,

An elder stitching memories to verse,

The refugee who maps their pain in signs,

The lover spelling vows the stars rehearse—

In every cry that ink and parchment bear,

A million souls exclaim, ”You’re not alone there.”

So let the skeptics claim that poems fade—

No screen can replicate the hand’s slow trace,

The weight of silence where a comma’s laid,

The ache of metaphors no time can erase.

For when machines have drained their hollow songs,

The poet’s heartbeat still where it belongs.

Then lift the cup of stanzas to the sun,

Let every voice intone its sacred part.

The day is now—the old, the young, the ones

Who weave the world’s fragments into art.

March 21st, the earth in chorus swells:

“We are the poets. Nothing else compels.”

                    -        Sivakumar Raman

A Poem - “Ode to the Celestial Voyagers” (Sunita and Butch)

 

 Volume - 1                             Issue -2                     March 2025     

“Ode to the Celestial Voyagers”

(Sunita and Butch)

Beneath the ISS’s metallic gleam,
They watched Earth spin—a nine-month dream,
Where eight days swelled to seasons long,
Sunita, Butch, where stars belong.

Through fire’s wrath, the Dragon soared,
A chariot by cosmic roar,
Then plunged where dawn’s first blush unfurled,
To meet the waves of their own world.

As Florida’s tides embraced their steel,
A pod arose with phosphorescent zeal—
Dolphins, sleek in twilight’s glaze,
Curved like moons through ocean’s haze.

“The unplanned welcome crew!” they cheered,
While Meghan’s hull drew near, revered,
Harnessed tight from sapphire deep,
Nick, Aleksandr climbed from sleep.

Then Sunita emerged—her breath kissed air,
Nine moons of weightless nights to bear,
Butch followed, grounded, salt-rimmed grace,
The sky’s chill washed from every face.

For those who brave the void’s tightrope,
Where silence drowns and darkness gropes,
The sea, wise warden, sings its hymn—
A galaxy where stars can swim.

                       -       Sivakumar Raman

 Volume - 1                             Issue -2                     March 2025     

A STORY OF WEALTH AND WISDOM

Ahamed and Mohammed had been best friends since childhood. Growing up in a middle-class neighbourhood in Chennai, they watched their parents work tirelessly to make ends meet. Yet, their views on money were vastly different.

Ahamed was obsessed with wealth. He believed money was the key to happiness and security. From a young age, he devoured books on investments, stock markets, and business strategies. Always seeking ways to multiply his income, he was convinced that the more he had, the better his life would be.

Mohammed, on the other hand, had a more balanced approach. He saw money as a tool, not a goal. He saved diligently, invested wisely, but never let money consume his thoughts. To him, true happiness came from contentment, relationships, and personal growth rather than the relentless pursuit of financial success.

Their career paths reflected their philosophies. Ahamed took the high-risk, high-reward route—quitting stable jobs to start businesses, investing in volatile markets, and working tirelessly to stay ahead. His bank account grew rapidly, but so did his stress and anxiety. Every market fluctuation disturbed his peace of mind. He was always chasing the next big opportunity, never feeling satisfied.

Mohammed, however, chose a stable career. He lived within his means, invested conservatively, and never let financial worries dictate his happiness. He had enough to live comfortably, pursue hobbies, and spend quality time with family and friends. While Ahamed was consumed by the thrill of making money, Mohammed found joy in simple things like reading, traveling, and meaningful conversations.

One day, Ahamed invited Mohammed to his newly purchased penthouse, adorned with luxurious furniture and expensive artwork.

“Look at this, Mohammed! This is success!” he exclaimed. “All these years of hard work have finally paid off.”

Mohammed smiled and asked, “It’s impressive, Ahamed! But tell me, are you happy?”

Ahamed hesitated. “Happiness comes with more success. I still have bigger goals—a mansion, a luxury car, early retirement. There’s so much more to achieve.”

Mohammed nodded but said nothing. He understood that Ahamed was caught in the endless cycle of ‘more,’ where no amount of money was ever enough.

Then, the unexpected happened. A financial crisis struck, wiping out a large portion of Ahamed’s wealth. His high-risk investments collapsed, and his business suffered heavy losses. The lavish lifestyle he had built began crumbling. The fear of losing everything kept him awake at night.

Desperate and disoriented, Ahamed met Mohammed at a quiet café.

“I don’t understand, Mohammed,” he admitted. “I worked harder than anyone else, took all the right risks, and still lost so much. How do you always stay so calm?”

Mohammed sipped his tea and replied, “Because I never let money define my peace. You built your life around accumulating wealth, always chasing more. I built mine around financial security and contentment. The difference is, I don’t need more to be happy.”

Ahamed sat in silence, absorbing his friend’s words. For years, he had believed that more money meant more happiness. But now, he realized he had been chasing an illusion.

Determined to change, Ahamed began reading about behavioral finance, human psychology, and the true meaning of wealth. He learned that financial success wasn’t just about accumulation but about security, freedom, and peace of mind. He started making wiser investments, focusing on stability rather than constant growth.

More importantly, he reconnected with the things he had once ignored—spending time with family, enjoying simple pleasures, and appreciating what he already had.

Years later, Ahamed and Mohammed sat on a beach, watching the sunset.

Ahamed turned to his friend and said, “For years, I thought wealth was about having more. But now, I see that true wealth is about needing less.”

Mohammed smiled. “The richest person isn’t the one with the most money, but the one who finds contentment with what they have.”

Ahamed nodded. “You were right all along, my friend. Money is important, but how we think about it matters even more.”

Moral of the story:

The psychology of money is not about how much you earn but how you perceive and use it. True wealth isn’t about endless accumulation but about financial security, peace of mind, and contentment. Money should be a tool to enhance life, not a goal that controls it. Happiness doesn’t come from having more, but from needing less.

*****

Author: APARNA G

Perungulathur, Chennai -63

Mail ID: aparnag171290@gmail.com