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  • Tradition
  • Diane Mehta (bio)

I’ve heard the roar of devotion in the ocean’s regularity. With a lifejacket and the shuffle of waves over The rope I was tied to, the edge of the world was childhood, The Officer’s Club had room for foreigners and rich coloreds. With the harness and servants close, even the surging waves, Black and vast as the heads of rioting nationalists in ‘47, Composed an anthem I didn’t then know were the lines of Tagore. His songs sparked Yeats’ rocky iambs and the deep drone of time Future in Eliot’s Quartets. I’ve learned second-hand What India did to my rhythm, the history of which Makes it less my home than my fascination. The cold blue sea corrects my speech pathologies to pure American, Unsettled iambs in the idioms stubbornly slanting to the east.

Diane Mehta

Diane Mehta has published poems in Salamander, The Formalist, The Columbia Review, and The Antioch Review.

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