Alankar(Decor) -229 Poem by Indira Renganathan

A Microcosm's Prayer(Slokha)

Sloka, is the most common Sanskrit meter and is a descendant of the older Vedic gayatri
The sloka, meaning 'song', although metric, is not considered poetic.
It functions more as the equivalent to Western prose with lines and meter and
is often used in narratives or epics.

The defining features of the sloka are:
stanzaic, written in any number of couplets made up of 2 hemistiches.
The hemistiches can be broken into 4 lines or padas creating quatrains,4 lines or padas
syllabic, either 2 lines of 16 syllables each or 4 hemistiches of 8 syllables each.
metric, alternate hemistiches of trochaic and iambic patterns.


A Microcosm's Prayer

Divine Mother, thou art dazzling
Dazzling so huge that I can't hold
Mother of mothers all and whole
Pray, me a droplet rise my size

Divine Mother thou art in all
Thou art in all flora, fauna
In this tiny droplet so too
Rise my size within me, I watch