Beneath the Surface

where what is felt outlasts what is said

Welcome to Poetry - A Sanctuary of Words, A Symphony of Thought

In a world that moves too fast, where noise often drowns out meaning, this space exists as a quiet retreat, a gentle pause. You've found a place where words are allowed to linger, where thoughts can breathe, and where emotions are not hurried along, but honoured.

This isn't just a website. It's something more personal — a journey I've chosen to share with you. These poems are not written for the sake of rhyme or rhythm alone. They are born from lived moments, quiet reflections, deep observations. Each one is a conversation: between myself and the world, and now, between myself and you.

In 2025, I was selected as one of six poets from over 350 applicants for the Utkarsh Poetry Fellowship, and a debut chapbook is forthcoming from Atta Galatta, Bangalore. I share this not as a credential, but as a marker of where the writing has arrived: into rooms and hands beyond my own. That feels worth naming once, and then leaving behind, so the poems can speak for themselves.

My words often begin in the wild, in the green folds of the Western Ghats, beneath a monsoon sky, or in the hush of a forest at the edge of a coffee estate. Nature is my first muse. Through poetry, I try to capture not only its breathtaking beauty, but also its delicate balance, its silences, and its warnings. These are love letters to the planet, and quiet calls to care for it while we still can.

But poetry doesn't stop at nature's edge. It spills into other spaces: into philosophy, history, memory, and emotion. Some poems ask questions. Some sit with pain. Others carry irony like a second skin. They may touch on love, loss, resistance, or wonder, but always they are written with intention. Every line is crafted to make you pause, not just scroll past.

I believe words can do more than comfort. They can challenge. They can change minds and open hearts. They can teach us how to feel again in a world that often forgets to. Through this collection, I hope to gently unsettle, to awaken curiosity, to plant new thoughts, and perhaps to remind us of truths we've grown too busy to remember.

This is not a platform for poetry as performance. This is poetry as presence. As protest. As praise. It is a way of seeing the world - clearly, tenderly, and sometimes fiercely. Because literature, when written with honesty, still has the power to move us, to gather us, and to point us towards something better.

So if you're someone who seeks depth — if you feel at home among questions, or find meaning in quiet things, then you are welcome here. Whether you come with wonder, heartbreak, hope, or doubt, this space is yours too. Read slowly. Reflect freely. Let the words sit with you as long as they need to.

And if, in the quiet of these lines, something in you feels seen, or softened, or stirred, then we've already met. Not just as writer and reader, but as fellow travellers, trying to make sense of a complex world.

This is a sanctuary. Let the poems speak — not just to your mind, but to your spirit.

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ABOUT ME

Thoughts. Experiences. Inspiration. Engineering a Sustainable Future

Hello, I’m Naval Kishore, though many know me as U.S. Naval Gowda, a 21‑year‑old at the crossroads of academia, art and activism. Here’s a little of my story, spoken plainly, but coloured by all the passions that shape my life.

I grew up in the Western Ghats. Not as a visitor, not as a tourist with a notebook, but as someone who worked the land. Since 2018, I have been a farm hand on a plantation in Kodagu and Chikkamagaluru: coffee, cardamom, pepper, and the particular silence of a forest at the edge of what has been cleared. Years and years of that. It shapes how you see. It shapes what you write.

I notice I'm also a geospatial data scientist by training, currently finishing a degree in Geography and Geoinformatics at Bangalore University, spending my days building spatial ML models of the same landscapes I grew up in, mapping where forests give way to plantations, where wild species and humans press against each other in shrinking corridors. The research and the poetry come from the same place. I don't think of them as different.

In 2025, I was selected for the Utkarsh Poetry Fellowship — one of six poets from over 350 applicants. A chapbook is coming, from Atta Galatta, Bangalore. I'm still getting used to the idea that these poems will live somewhere other than my own documents.

I write about the Western Ghats the way you write about something you love and are also worried about. But I also write about family dinners where no one says anything, about what it's like to sit in a therapy room and let the silence take its own chair, about prayer flags that fray but don't fall. About doubt dressed up as philosophy. About lukewarm tea and the quiet, absurd business of being alive.

Dance has been part of my life since I was five. Contemporary movement, dedicated enough that it was recognised nationally, including the Prakriti Excellence in Contemporary Dance Award and a Gold Medal at India's Dance Championship in 2022. When words are not enough, the body still knows what to do.

In quieter moments, I'm drawn to the uncanny — true crime, psychological thrillers, stories of the paranormal. They remind me that mystery hasn't left the world. That there are still things that don't fully resolve. I find that oddly comforting.

I don't know exactly who this website is for. Someone who reads slowly, maybe. Someone who has stood at the edge of a forest and felt both small and at home. Someone who has passed the salt across a table without saying what they meant. If that is you — you are welcome here.

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