Sculpturesque

Whenever I visited any ancient temples with beautiful sculptures I felt a strange sense of excitement as well as a strange deja vu, as if I had some connection with these sculptures.

In my last visit to Orissa, it was as if the temple sculptures at the Chausath Yogini temple (in a remote field in a village) called out to me," Why was I coming to meet them after so long? Why don't you come more often? Have you forgotten us, our beautiful connection?" I remembered how these sculptures were what I wanted to experience in my body, and Odissi meant to me the exploration of the sculptures inside my body. Maybe I was a sculptor in one of these temples in the medieval times, carving out beautiful body-scapes of frozen moments in time. 

In this life, as sculptures, dance and frozen moments of time run parallel through my being, I write my ode to the sculpturesque-ness of Odissi:

The sculptures of my being,

danced in my body,

Odissi it was to be,

a dance of the waves of the sea.

A fullness of being,

joyous curves,

the langorous arms,
like creepers of love.

The honey-sweet shringaar,

of mischievious kamarbands,

heavy, pregnant anklets,

serpentine necklaces that never end.

The sculpturesque arrived,

and became my pulse,

became my riyaaz,

as the fabric of me came together.

I found the dance of life,

the shape of my soul,

my sculpturesque lines,

my singing curves.

Sculpturesque and sculpture,

face each other with the beats of time,

are we artistic inspiration,

or just poems that reside in each other's hearts?