Description

You will learn a lot about how to be in the world, and how to keep you and your soul together, in the poems of The Hour of God. Line by line, stanza by stanza, they deliver a deeply human philosophy, with the lightest of touches. Whether it’s through mourning, or just pausing to appreciate moments of wonder, Vinita Agrawal reminds us of lessons we need to continually relearn through as she puts it, “disengagement, severing, letting go”. In doing so we discover that is how we belong, to ourselves and each other. — Rishi Dastidar

Vinita Agrawal’s poetry is both ecological and metaphysical. As she traverses through worlds stirred by haboob — be they her own interior world of grief, the world of Tibetan exiles or the world of widespread bulbuls and near-extinct vultures, her Rumi spirit of self-awareness shines through. The Hour of God is an inexhaustible pot of exquisite poems from which one must drink one doya at a time, pause to think, and drink again.  — Ko Ko Thett

Vinita Agrawal’s poems are sensitive and transporting, guiding us to open our hearts and empathise where we must. Rivers, mountains and flowers are real, particular and expressive in her poems. She writes through a full spectrum — from the heaviness of personal loss and the ‘hard bone of longing’ to the meditative splendour of renewals in the ‘flute of the spine.’ But this responsive poet is also a poet of responsibility. Whether lingering over an injured deer or reflecting about extinct vultures, landless immigrants and the disasters caused by oil spills, she embodies a higher conscience — the mark of a classic poet. — Mani Rao

Vinita Agarwal’s poetry always takes me to a place of tranquil introspection. But in The Hour of God, she leads me in deeper, into an intimate grotto where her poems are like candles whose flames illuminate the deeply personal and the universal, the political and the environmental, the earthly and the spiritual through the wick of image-rich observations. This volume of poetry is about, and I unhesitatingly pluck the words straight out of Vinita’s own poem — ‘The Sun Must be Out’ — ‘reflections and reality/thought and vision/embracing and shedding,’ and it will resonate with readers long after the last page has been turned. — Shikhandin

Vinita Agrawal is based in Indore, India. She holds a MA in political science and a diploma in Computer Applications. She has authored six books of poetry — Words Not Spoken, The Longest Pleasure, The Silk of Hunger, Two Full Moons, Twilight Language and Eartha. Books edited by her include two anthologies on climate change — Open Your Eyes and Count Every Breath, The Centennial Volume on Nissim Ezekiel: Poet & Father and one on the Kashmiri Poet Ghulam Rasool Nazki. She is the recipient of the Jayanta Mahapatra National Award for Literature 2025. Her poem ‘Conversation with a Seed’ won an award at Chrysalis Brew Poetry in 2025. She is runner-up in the Mānoa Poetry Contest 2025. She received a prize for her poem ‘The Light Phenomena’ from Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA) in 2025, the Proverse Prize Hong Kong 2021, the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize 2018 and the Gayatri GaMarsh Memorial Award for Literary Excellence, USA, 2015. She was long listed for the Kingfisher Poetry Prize 2025. Her book Eartha was longlisted for the Sarojini Naidu Award for Poetry 2025. The book won the YathaKatha Award 2025 and the Voyages of Verse award under the aegis of One Tribune in 2025 and long listed in The Wise Owl Awards. Eartha was also shortlisted for the Pragati-E-Vichaar Literature Festival 2026. She won a special mention in the Hawkers Prize 2019. Her work was shortlisted for the inaugural Dipankar Khiwani Memorial prize 2021. She co-edits the Yearbook series of Indian Poetry in English. She was former Poetry Editor with Usawa Literary Review. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. She is on the Advisory Board of the Tagore Literary Prize. She is the author of a children’s fiction book Jade and the Harmony Flyers (Bare Bones Publishing). Her work has been published in Global South, Pratik, Mascara Review, Indian Literature, Asian Cha, Voice and Verse, Tiger Moth Review, The Bombay Literary Magazine and the Knopf Newsletter, Canary, Tabula Rasa, Parcham, Chrysalis Brew, SFPA, Blue Mountain Review and Madras Courier, among others. She has read at several festivals in India and at the Filey festival in Mexico. She is one of the twenty poets to be featured in a documentary on Asian poets titled Deepest Uprising made in Taiwan. She is a birder and a photographer. She has deep compassion for animals and a genuine love for nature. www.vinitawords.com.

From the Book

Guard the Hour of God

Guard the Hour like a vigil.
Guard it from distraction and dogma,
from hurry and the habitual,
from the glance that skims the surface
and the gaze that presumes to own.

Guard the Hour like a clearing.
Guard it from the calculated storm,
from the charlatan’s grin and the cynic’s shrug,
from polished rhetoric
and the dissecting lens.

Guard the Hour as an aperture.
Guard it from false prophets, familiar scripts,
from the neutron star’s cold pull,
from saccharine devotion
and the autopsy of faith.

Guard the Hour as arrival.
Guard it from the blaze that blinds
from the violence done to wonder,
from the packaged pilgrimage
and the frantic demand for epiphany.

Guard the Hour as a truth.
Guard it from the corrosion of doubt,
from the varnish of tradition thick over the living pulse,
from the dew that promises revelation but only chills
and the brokers trading cheap certitude.

Guard the Hour as a threshold.
Guard it from the idol carved of doctrine,
from the weight of Uppercase Decrees,
from the inheritance of fear
and from the Hour’s own unbearable, annihilating light.

Guard the Hour as a surrender.
Guard it from the silent fractures within the waiting soul,
and the well-worn rut of ritual
and the grime of commerce,
and the winter of the heart.

and yes —
Guard it fiercely from the name ‘God’ itself.

Ma

Let time be sandpaper,
wearing slow your grain, Ma —
coarse, at first,
then sleek as marble.
You are the trace-line, Ma
where moss writes
its green psalms.

What Is the Word

for
a pool beneath a waterfall
the shape of a bend in a river
a heart, clenched and heavy, holding rain
tomorrow‘s numbness waiting in the wings
beaten skin
bruised breaths
hollow hours
hugs contusions give themselves
days where sunlight does not reach
seeing oneself on a stranger’s bookshelf
the key that returns you home
the sound of mother humming?

Homeland

Roots grip deep in contested dirt.
This anchor, this ache.
A name whispered into cracked walls,
mother’s voice in the stones.

Not an open sky, but a known weight.
The shape your shadow carves.
Metal that remembers your name,
cold against warm skin.

Stubborn stain on the palm,
earth under the nail.
The song hummed when the road calls loudest.
The unsung verse.

The question answered
only by standing where your bones settled.
Where the earth knows your weight,
roots deep as graves.

          Reviews

Meet Vinita Agrawal in Bold Journey

Book Excerpt: Reflections On Time And Impermanence in Outlook

The poems in the collection ‘The Hour of God’ offer a poignant reflection on the reciprocal relationship between humanity and the world. They engage deeply with our planet, acknowledging both its wounds and its potential.