Ashok Niyogi was born in Calcutta in 1955. He was schooled all over India in Irish Christian Brothers'
Schools and graduated with Honors in Economics from Presidency College.
Ashok spent 30 years in the world of International Commerce,15 in East Europe and Russia and the CIS. 
His work has taken him all over the world and he now divides his time between California where his two 
daughters live, Russia and India.He is currently unemployed because writing poetry is not considered 
gainful employment, but does have a timber plantation in Goa, India.
Ashok has two books of poetry in India - 'Crossroads' and 'Reflections in the Dark' (both from A-4
Publications) and one book of poems from the USA - 'Tentatively' (iUniverse). 
He has been published extensively on line and in print in the USA, the UK, New Zealand,
 Australia and Canada in magazines and Anthologies ( search engines like google or yahoo 
should give a reasonably updated list of on line work, not including work accepted but not yet published).
 

BLOCKED IN

Rockslides in front of me
Take the road away,
Mud and uprooted trees
Take the road away,
Just round a bend 
I have crossed.

Suspended above a gorge
Between river a mile below
And sky miles above,
Driving rain,
Clouds eat up pines.

Puddles form and run away
Between myself and me.


PHOTOGRAPH

Nothing between 
The sun and me.
Sheep stewarded 
By the man and his dog
Across the road
And up the next incline,
After the last straggler is gone
I will be alone,
Standing just where I am.

I must move on,
Wash my face 
By the mountain stream,
And enter the interplay
Of light and shade,
Primordial canopies
Of ancient trees.

Purgatory
Shaped by a designer God,
Heaven 
Is above the snowline,
Now blinding,
Now hiding in opaque cloud.

Nicholas Roerich,
A pencil sketch will not do,
You need color for this.


Note: Roerich, a famous Russian artist and painter 
who did a lot of work in the Himalayas.


MORNING TEA

Sculpted into a wall of ice,
Gods of malignant device
Blight cherry orchards
With early frost.

Prematurely gray,
This mountain dawn
Moves westward
Like a locust swarm,
Silent plunder
Of my peaks in black.

Drops of dew
On blades of grass
Await fulfillment
Of insatiable lust,
Glitter with the morning ray,
And then burn away.

In my rose garden
Bees have arrived,
I contemplate
This erotic interplay ---

Wake my dogs,
And sip at tea
From porcelain cups.


AYIN

In ten million years
They will approach 
Middle age.
Wind, rain,
Sleet and ice,
Mountain streams
And waterfalls,
And humankind
Will etch wrinkles
On their face.

Ravines and rapine,
Sodomy
Will leave quarried stone
On post-menopausal
Riverbeds,
And I will dig
For wriggling worms
In lecherous mud.

They were born 
And will be Ayin,
For they were born 
Of the Ayin.

Tectonic plates
Will recreate.
The peasant man
Will be at work again,
Cutting terraces
Out of mountainsides,
For his one measly crop.


Note: Ayin (God) is borrowed from the Kabbalah and literally means ‘nothing’. 
I find the concept rudimentarily common with the Hindu philosophy of Advaitavad, 
which worships an eternal formless entity.