GAS Featured Poet: Saloni Kaul

     Saloni Kaul, author and poet, first published at the age of ten, has stayed in print since on five continents, including eighteen states of the USA. As critic and columnist, Saloni has all of forty-five years years of being published. Saloni Kaul's first volume, a fifty poem collection was published in the USA in 2009. Subsequent volumes include Universal One and Essentials All. 

    She has been published recently in  Mad Swirl's Poetry Forum (contains ongoing Saloni Kaul poetry page), The Penwood Review, Scarlet Leaf Review, Blueline (State University of New York), OVI Magazine, Mantis (Stanford University), The Whimperbang Journal, The Imaginate (Rutger's University), Mystical Muse Poetry Magazine, The Charleston Anvil, The Treasure Chest, The Poetry Leaves Anthology and Exhibition, Arteidolia, Quail Bell Magazine, Harbinger Asylum and The Transcendent Zero Press and The Lullwater Review (Emory University of Atlanta). 

    In addition to performing poetry solo, Saloni Kaul collaborates with artists on installations and exhibitions revolving around her own poetry and with musicians and composers on live and recorded performances of poetry set to music.

ON EMBROIDERED SHAWL

 

Most hesitantly, unaffectedly,

In her unworldly-wise artless manner,

Without unnecessary fiddling, beating about the bush,

She spread out generously all her unspoken 

Hitherto closeted thoughts

On a timid line like a shawl,

Soon smoothening the creases uttered rough

With pauses unprepared, irresolute

Naively punctuating taut the unrehearsed speech,

As she spoke uninstructedly yet honestly

As though she may well have been insipidly logging

Far-flung distances wishy-washily

In a logbook most unsentimental,

Toying with their propinquity in contexts distant,

Bringing back and forth those adjoining zones

On the termed timed narrow gauge.

There is always a namby-pamby nearness

In narrow-minded constructed time, in spaces solitary

Where close kinship's liberally concerned

And approximations detailed scarcely count

When the point is minutely driven home.

Flabbergasted, as astounded 

As in a hair-raising encounter,

Skin tingling like nap fibres

Covering tiniest of trees 

Or on a downy fuzzy flannel scrap,

Our newly enlightened listener breathed in and responded 

Directly in this volley of words.