Kala Ramesh
All That’s Hidden
Krishna ji, as he was affectionately called, was already seated under the famed banyan tree at his residence in Chennai, where the evening lecture was about to begin. He said there was no such thing as fear and that it was merely a fake emotion, something that could be overcome.
Just then, a group of people rose from where they were seated on the ground, shouting. Soon, other groups did the same, and a wave passed through the audience.
Nobody knew the reason for the commotion until a bullfrog leapt through the wire fence into the darkness.
a flamboyance
of flamingos, ha!
the void when they leave
Note: Krishna ji: Late Jiddu Krishnamurti, a renowned philosopher.
About the Author
Kala Ramesh is a renowned pioneer in the field of haikai literature in India. Her 2017 book Beyond the Horizon Beyond was awarded a Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize Certificate.
I admire this poem, Kala. It turns on irony and vanishing. Krishna ji’s denial of fear is instantly tested by the audience’s panic over a mere frog, then is deepened by the haiku’s echo. “Ha!” functions like a vernacular cutting exclamation, similar to the Japanese kireji “ya” — which interrupts the thought-stream and opens a resonant pause in the verse.