Echoes of My Heart
Harjit Lally
Publisher: Notion Press | ISBN: 979-8-90176-940-9
Poems have a way of whispering sweet nothings into our ears, stirring memories we thought we had forgotten and feelings we perhaps never quite learned to name. Harjit Lally’s Echoes of My Heart does precisely that. It is a tender, deeply personal collection—an intimate rendering of a life well-loved, well-lived, and deeply felt.
Spread across 117 pages, the book brings together three short stories—The Red Ruby, A Confession, and Parting Reunion?—alongside 38 poems exploring an evocative range of themes: love, ageless love, beauty, silence, ecstasy, the full moon, sorrow, music, happiness, remembrance, surrender, and the quiet complexities of the human heart. These are poems of feelings and memories—some meant to be felt, others meant to be honoured.
Harjit Lally is grace personified, and her poetry bears the unmistakable imprint of someone who pays the price for possessing a heart that feels deeply. Aptly titled Echoes of My Heart, the collection is as much an introduction to the poet as it is to her poetry. Her pen reveals her pain, passion, poise, personality and persona. Even when she descends into the depths of the ocean of emotion, she does not return empty-handed. She returns with a pearl.
This is particularly evident in ‘Memories’, where the past refuses to remain buried:
Memories sprout like beans
Even though a decade old,
Fresh like daisies they seem
Crumbling my attitude cold;
Like nine pins falling
The defences of being bold;
Leaving me utterly shaking
‘In my moments of gold….’
If Memories looks backwards, ‘Hope’ looks ahead. Here, a season becomes a metaphor for renewal and the continuity:
Yellow mellow autumn leaf
Come rest on my sleeve;
Golden tinted rust and brown
Never ever fall down.
Your end of days,
My end of days,
While comparing …. Why drown in a sea of sorrow brown?
A new life begins
When this one ends.
Hope lives on
Love god send.
Echoes of My Heart is therefore more than a collection of poems and short stories, Lally writes from the heart, and the heart, in turn, becomes both her subject and her language. Harjit Lally’s Echoes of My Heart invites us to pause, remember, feel and, above all, to hope. And sometimes, that is precisely what poetry is meant to do.
