Reetika Vazirani, born in India in 1962, came to the US with her family in 1968. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1984 and late received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for travel and study in India, Thailand, Japan, and China. She then graduated with a Hoyns Fellow from the University of Virginia with her M.F.A.

She as also the recipient of Discovery/The Nation Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Poets & Writers Exchange Program Award, fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee writers conferences, the Glenna Luschei/Prairie Schooner Award for her essay, "The Art of Breathing," which appears in the anthology How We Live our Yoga (Beacon 2001). 

Vaziran, author of World Hotel (book of poems, 2002) was also a Contributing and Advisory Editor for Shenandoah and a guest poetry editor of two issues. She was also a book review editor for Callaloo and a Senior Poetry Editor of the new journal, Catamaran, which featured work by artists from South Asia. She translated poems from Urdu. Her work was translated into Italian.

She lived in Trenton, New Jersey with her family, the writer Yusef Komunyakaa, and their son Jahan. She was Writer-in-Residence at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, USA., with the intent of joining the English department at Emory University.

Two Cities

By Reetika Vazirani 

That 4 a.m. I lay
back on the living room
couch, seeing as it was
still night. At 5 a.m.
Elle's light in Unit B
upstairs came on, and she
sailed down the wooden steps
and drove off to bake bread
until two. Then I thought
of you doing to me
those things you described on
the phone. I in utter
surprise kept asking, Would
you really? Yes, you would.
But you had not phoned me
this morning, though it flew
anyway: I heard you
patiently interrogate.
At first I didn't know
what to do.

      Six years later
this was better for all
the time taken out, gone
were the unimportant
miles between our cities,
even better than on
the phone or in person,
though it was without doubt
only you in your absence.
Then the sun rose, wiping
away this entanglement,
as I shake creases out
of the sheets and fold them
like a note I will send
to tell you how things are
going, pretty much the
same and good on this end.

Going to See the Taj Mahal

By Reetika Vazirani

When we set out on the train to Agra
I thought, What an old palace we are going to see,
        it’s an old grave.
I was tired when we reached the station and you hired a taxi
to take us to the steps of the Taj Mahal;
you couldn’t even wait until morning,
said it was something to take in by moonlight,
white marble against black sky is a great sight in moonlight
        you said
(marble just cleaned for a holiday).
And there beyond our driver’s wheel I saw the domes—
the large dome and the four surrounding domes.
The silhouette stood out so clearly that for a moment
I forgot this fact in the midst of the splendor
(the long stretch of grass leading up to the site):
the Empress Mumtaz, she bore fourteen heirs for Shah Jahan—
absurd to forget Mumtaz at her marble grave,
marble banded with prophecy and verse.

But what did I know of the Empress except this tomb?
So I pictured her this way:
she was not a beauty, nor especially devout
(always slow to cover her head).
On Thursdays when the open market came past the red
        stone quarry,
she dressed as her handmaid
and took a poor cloth sack into town
where she bartered for beads women wore on ordinary days;
and secretly with cheap dyes she’d paint herself into the wild
        casual beauty of youth
(the kohl inexpertly applied but alluring).
Then she gave her sack away or left it on the road
should someone find it hoarded in her suite—
the Empress buying this five-and-dime garbage!
And she imagined her life without the constant royal curfew.
There were places she couldn’t go—there were even daily
        attractions at the well,
attractions too scandalous to list.

If only the Emperor’s architects knew her!—
to free them from the illusions which inspired the tomb,
to free them from the wished-for glamour of a Mumtaz.

Instructions for Building Straw Huts

By Yusef Komunyakaa

First you must have

unbelievable faith in water,

in women dancing like hands playing harps

for straw to grow stalks of fire.

You must understand the year

that begins with your hands tied

behind your back,

worship of dark totems

weighed down with night birds that shift their weight

& leave holes in the sky. You must know

what's behind the shadow of a treadmill--

its window the moon's reflection

& silent season reaching

into red sunlit hills.

You must know the hard science

of building walls that sway with summer storms.

Locking arms to a frame of air, frame of oak

rooted to ancient ground

where the door's constructed last,

just wide enough for two lovers

to enter on hands & knees.

You must dance

the weaverbird's song

for mending water & light

with straw, earth, mind, bright loom of grain

untortured by bushels of thorns.