For a Dancer ( by Jackson Browne)
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https://www.gofundme.com/saving-janavi
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Category: nature
Book Giveaway
❣️BOOK GIVE AWAY!!!❣️
❣️Dear Friends, We are giving away a hardcover copy of Janavi’s beautiful book of poetry and photography to draw attention to the fundraiser. She is seriously ill and needs your help. To enter please give a donation of any amount or if you are unable, please share this post with as many friends as you can.
https://www.gofundme.com/saving-janavi
❣️After you’ve donated or shared please click this link to enter. You’ll be asked to watch a book trailer with a review by Catherine Schweig and poem read by Janavi Held
https://www.amazon.com/ga/p/d87d82713d695b19…
Thank you friends❣️ We are grateful for your help
“Letters to My Oldest Friend” now available as an ePub
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/letters-to-my-oldest-friend/id1273048675?mt=11
For Wholesale Inquires, review copies and author interview please contact:
letterstomyoldestfriend@laflor.dk
Watch the book trailer:
Washing windows
Washing windows
must see the air
as it whips through trees
under birds wings.
~ Janavi Held © 2017
It’s raining
It’s raining
I sit where
I love to be
in the half light
melting
into the
starving
earth
leaves glow
mirrors reflect
everything
I think I see.
~ Janavi Held © 2017
“Letters to My Oldest Friend” is now available on Amazon
In praise of Letters to My Oldest Friend
Like many God-inspired poets of India’s Bhakti or devotional past (Mirabai and Chandidas come easily to mind), Janavi Held—writer, photographer, cineaste, observer of small miracles—chronicles the arrhythmia of a heart in love with Divinity. Letters to My Oldest Friend is a revelation. In elegant, spare verse and contemplative visual imagery, she gently cautions that we are victims of speeding postmodernism at risk of losing our souls, and that we will find the tools of our salvation in the quiet, unassuming details of everyday life. Here is a much needed roadmap to our inner geography, chartered by a gifted voice of conscience and our own better selves. Read, look, savor, and be inspired.
Joshua M. Greene
author, Swami in a Strange Land: How Krishna Came to the West 2016
In her beautiful debut collection of poems, Janavi Held takes us on a journey of awakening, as she explores the ways in which her relationships with struggle, time, nature and beauty in this world, relate to her burgeoning relationship with the divine. From a restless: “there are so many stories in my lost heart” to the epilogue’s triumphant: “the heart speaks softly now,” her poems and photographs artistically chart the course of a soul moving gracefully through existential angst, as revealed to us in this prayerful dialogue with her “oldest friend”.
Catherine L. Schweig
Founder of Journey of the Heart Poetry Project Editor of Poetry as a Spiritual Practice (Golden Dragonfly Press, 2016)
“Letters to My Oldest Friend” is a classic spiritual journey, starting with the anguish of her losses – of mobility, of mind (she says, but the poem belies it), “wrapped in a blanket of thorns”, then to the longing for the spirit, the Friend, and finally a joyous reunion with spirit through nature. I read these poems almost with tears. I also thought of how poems like these, especially the opening ones, could create compassion in the reader for all the sick and disabled from whom we tend to avert our gaze. Janavi Held’s language is beautiful and evocative, as when she writes, “remembering is a lost art/in the mind of these misshapen times.” The book is, quite simply, a gem.
Nina Mermey Klippel
author,”Tricks of The Light and Other Poems”, 2010
editor, The Village Zendo Bulletin
Monsoon Dreams
Monsoon Dreams
Bleached and tattered
bark of tree
leaves mired in wild wind
endless sights
of fragrant meadows
transparence filtering
flying pollen
and wet laden clouds
with white
and gray
monsoon dreams
inside atoms
resides the
restless
Master
playing
in a forest
of His
own making.
Janavi Held © 2017
My book of poetry is now available for pre-order:
on Amazon
Divine Names
Divine Names
Your divine
Names wander
into my words
my open mouth
drinking that
temptation is
utterly fed here
sitting under another
spring sky.
We have been
together for so long
yet, during the cold,
wet winter
I forgot to be happy
forgot the feeling
of Your warm air
on my skin
and how
Your flowers
make me laugh.
And today
I can’t remember
why I left You
forsaking the
authenticity
of our eternal
friendship.
Janavi Held © 2017
Flooding
Flooding
Within the
shadowy waters
of illusion
I built thick
castle walls
sunken deep
in those hazy waters
my heart froze
and slept for eons.
Awakened from this
deep sleep of ignorance
by a flood of
Your liberating
monsoon rain
You’ve opened the sky
in my heart
and the
walls of my fortress
are a sunken wreck
I have floated
to the surface
waves
crushed my body
as I rose You
carefully collected
all the lost parts
and knitted me
together with
Your lovely hands
saturated with
eternal love.
~ Janavi Held © 2017
Out on This Natural limb
Out on This Natural limb
On the ends
of wind-waving branches
I build my residence
watching all manner
of creatures grow into living
the fragrance of the wind
carrying pollen and ozone
feeds my inner ocean
as long fingers of sunlight reach
the vast expanse of my seeing.
Out on this natural limb
I wait for morning
clinging to the inside
of the earth’s desires.
~Janavi Held © 2017
Soaked
Soaked
A dead sea soaks
in memory
its form
now shapeless
has far to go
to be lost to
the little bits of
thought still
swimming its
dry banks.
My thoughts swell
memories tremble there
old incomplete sentences
structured in timeless
yawning, titanic clouds
blocking the realness of
now.
Janavi Held © 2017
Horizon
Horizon
I move too
as the waves
pierce the horizon
that distance
unattainable
longs for me as well
to embellish my ears
with wind
to swallow my eyes
inside that insatiable horizon.
Janavi Held © 2017
Letters to My Oldest Friend 