India Poetry Day at Harvard

The topic for the 10th Annual India Poetry reading was "Mother," quite suitably for the occassion of Mothers Day...

I wondered before I reached the venue what several grown up men would have to say on the topic of "Mother" -- would they become cloyingly reminiscent, endlessly thanking their moms for bringing them up, pardoning their many goof-ups, and always unquestioningly loving them...? I almost dreaded an afternoon of heavy-hearted sentiment, of pudgy-soft I-love-you-ma lyrics...

What I witnessed were several different, and even refreshing takes on the subject of "mother," and that certainly lifted the event from a plain ornery paen to moms (well, not that that would have been especially remiss, just too syrupy for my tastes, maybe).

So poets addressed the subject of "Mother" in several ways, many referring the Mother Nature, the mother of all of us, as it were, the great nourisher and sustainer; some invoked mother goddesses, of which there are plenty in Indian mythico-religious culture, but who also figure prominently in many pre-modern world belief-systems; there was a poem praising Sanskrit, the mother of all Indo-European languages (?) and also, the original source for the root "matr" from which various derivatives of the word "mother" sprang up around the world -- I am not commenting on the veracity of all this just yet; and to round everything off there was a poem that traced the degeneration of mankind to mothers who fell short in their responsibility of nurture...talk about anti-mushiness!!