Poetry

The Patriot

By Nissim Ezekiel

I am standing for peace and non-violence.
Why world is fighting fighting
Why all people of world
Are not following Mahatma Gandhi,
I am simply not understanding.
Ancient Indian Wisdom is 100% correct,
I should say even 200% correct,
But modern generation is neglecting-
Too much going for fashion and foreign thing.

Other day I'm reading newspaper
(Every day I'm reading Times of India
To improve my English Language)
How one goonda fellow
Threw stone at Indirabehn.
Must be student unrest fellow, I am thinking.
Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I am saying (to myself)
Lend me the ears.
Everything is coming -
Regeneration, Remuneration, Contraception.
Be patiently, brothers and sisters.

You want one glass lassi?
Very good for digestion.
With little salt, lovely drink,
Better than wine;
Not that I am ever tasting the wine.
I'm the total teetotaller, completely total,
But I say
Wine is for the drunkards only.

What you think of prospects of world peace?
Pakistan behaving like this,
China behaving like that,
It is making me really sad, I am telling you.
Really, most harassing me.
All men are brothers, no?
In India also
Gujaratis, Maharashtrians, Hindiwallahs
All brothers -
Though some are having funny habits.
Still, you tolerate me,
I tolerate you,
One day Ram Rajya is surely coming.

You are going?
But you will visit again
Any time, any day,
I am not believing in ceremony
Always I am enjoying your company.

(Recommended by By Mohan Kumar)

Between Going And Coming

By Octavio Paz

Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.

All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can't be touched.

Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.

Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.

The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theater of reflections.

I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.

The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.

-- Translated by Eliot Weinberger

(Recommended by Sujata Mukherjee)

IN A WORKING WOMEN'S HOSTEL

By Tara Patel

1

The evening is an experience of high tide.
I escape. Twelve storeys above the city
the terrace is my great outdoors.
Rs.350 p.m. to meet God is not much at all.
Somewhere along the skyscraper skyline
I walk to and fro. A nun without a vocation!

Am I lonely? Or am I a loner? The difference
must be resolved quickly now.
My private communion is overlooked by superior
balconies, terraces.
The sun makes a weeding finale. A henna-
coloured horizon, smudged eyeshadow clouds.

A patchwork of lights coming on compete
gaudily with the stars.
The rising full moon tells a familiar story.
A breeze purrs, inspires fear, I trip over
the silver wings fluttering on the crazy floor.
A distant sea roars in my ears.

Up here flight is a dangerous illusion.
Crying is a terminal argument. I
return to my room.

2

Waking up at night is a symptom of aging.
I kick aside the warm weather of my blanket,
the touch of my own thighs, breasts,
is an embarrassment.
In the winter cold I fold myself up in supplication
to hear myself more clearly.

Listening to my own confessions is a 
third-degree past-time.
I function as a one-woman courtroom.
I have sealed up my life i black envelopes
addressed to no one in particular.
'Confidential. It is the rough wool of a man
you want tonight and every night.'

'A woman can feed herself. Love begins
with a man.'
And so on and so on. The colour of bones
is in my hair now
and I have come to a standstill.
The passing days have a posthumous
touch to them.

(Recommended by Makrand Dubey) 

Love in a Bathtub

By Sujata Bhatt

Years later we'll remember the bathtub
the position of the taps
the water, slippery
as if a bucketful of eels had joined us ...
we'll be old, our children grown up
but we'll remember the water sloshing out
the useless soap,
the mountain of wet towels.
'Remember the bathtub in Belfast?'
we'll prod each other -

(Recommended by Manjri Tripathi)

The Word of The Silence

By Sri Aurobindo

A bare impersonal hush is now my mind,
A world of sight clear and inimitable,
A volume of silence by a Godhead signed,
A greatness pure, virgin of will.

Once on its pages Ignorance could write
In a scribble of intellect the blind guess of Time
And cast gleam-messages of ephemeral light,
A food for souls that wander on Nature's rim.

But now I listen to a greater Word
Born from the mute unseen omniscient Ray:
The Voice that only Silence' ear has heard
Leaps missioned from an eternal glory of Day.

All turns from a wideness and unbroken peace
To a tumult of joy in a sea of wide release.

(Recommended by Sonalika)

I Am He

By Shankaracharya

Mind, nor intellect, nor ego, feeling;
Sky nor earth nor metals am I.
I am He, I am He, Blessed spirit, I am He!
No birth, no death, no caste have I;
Father, mother, have I none.
I am He, I am He, Blessed spirit, I am He!
Beyond the flights of fancy, formless am I,
Permeating the limbs of all life;
Bondage I do not fear; I am free, ever free.
I am He, I am He, Blessed spirit, I am He!

(Recommended by Siddhartha)

Colour Problems in the Family

Adil Jussawala

Mother forgot her features when the rest,
Pinker with Persia, found her future black.

So father turned up, obligingly darker,
His iron skin scorched in its shirt of rust.

Yellow frogs, grandmother called us,
Sallow herself, brass with a touch of ash.

Then you, rose, haven for browns and blacks,
Said that colours that ran in my family
Had no place in your sun.

True.
They were colours I shed on your shoulder,
Bled on your shirt as you spoke.
They were true, and continue to run.

( Recommended by Manjari Tripathi)

POSTCARDS FROM GOD (1)

By Imtiaz Dharker

Yes, I do feel like a visitor,
a tourist in this world
that I once made.
I rarely talk,
except to ask the way,
distrusting my interpreters,
tired out by the babble
of what they do not say.
I walk around through battered streets,
distinctly lost,
looking for landmarks
from another, promised past.

Here, in this strange place,
in a disjointed time,
I am nothing but a space
that sometimes has to fill.
Images invade me.
Picture postcards overlap my empty face
demanding to be stamped and sent.

"Dear . . . "
Who am I speaking to?
I think I may have misplaced the address,
but still, I feel the need
to write to you;
not so much or your sake
as for mine,

to raise these barricades
against my fear:
Postcards from god.
Proof that I was here.

(Recommended by Shashank)

IT MAKES

By Gieve Patel

It makes sense not
to have the body
seamless,
hermetically sealed, a
non-orificial
box of incorruptibles.
Better shot through and through!
Interpenetrated
-- with the world. Air
mists my lymph. Ex
cretion, degrading
routine,
gives the world passage.
I am a bead.
Sorted,
thumbed,
threaded,
strung,
fingered (did you say) by
threads of all hues,
riddled through,
happily.

(Recommended by Kumar Anand)

Annotation to the Ustad's Treasury of Verses

By Ranjit Hoskote

No poems, really, from the Ustad's middle period.
Just a few notations he'd left to brew.
Her ivory comb. A strand of wool torn free
by a trailing fingernail, redder than any gulmohur.
Jade bowls standing on a smoke-blackened shelf.
In the window, the river's spilt silver.
A tortoiseshell cat playing on the doorstep.
And, cancelled in a rage of strokes,
the grey-eyed sitarist drowning, out of earshot.

Just this broken song, suggesting he had chosen
to tarnish his rhymes with a warmer breath
than the court would permit. He sings
of his draggled woollen coat, his winters
spent in a potter's kiln, roofed in colour
by fickle skies, the river a shrivelled skin of ice,
the wildcat his one companion, the drum and blast
of rain his only music: he's begun, already, to hear
the perfect cadence beaten on the heart's shattered anvil.

(Recommended by Shilpa Tripathi)

UNCLAIMED

By Vikram Seth

To make love with a stranger is the best.
There is no riddle and there is no test.?

To lie and love, not aching to make sense
Of this night in the mesh of reference.

To touch, unclaimed by fear of imminent day,
And understand, as only strangers may.

To feel the beat of foreign heart to heart
Preferring neither to prolong nor part.

To rest within the unknown arms and know
That this is all there is; that this is so.

(Recommended by Smriti Sinha)

STILL LIFE

By A.K. Ramanujan

When she left me
after lunch,I read
for a while.
But I suddenly wanted
to look again
and I saw the half-eaten
sandwich,
bread,
lettuce and salami,
all carrying the shape
of her bite.

(Recommended by Pankaj Khanna)

ODE TO BOMBAY

By Dilip Chitre

I had promised you a poem before I died
Diamonds storming out of the blackness of a piano
Piece by piece I fall at my own dead feet
Releasing you like a concerto from my silence
I unfasten your bridges from my insistent bones
Free your railway lines from my desperate veins
Dismantle your crowded tenements and meditating machines
Remove your temples and brothels pinned in my skull

You go out of me in a pure spiral of stars
A funeral progressing towards the end of time
Innumerable petals of flame undress your dark
Continuous stem of growing

I walk out of murders and riots
I fall out of smouldering biographies
I sleep on a bed of burning languages
Sending you up in your essential fire and smoke
Piece by piece at my own feet I fall
Diamonds storm out of a black piano

Once I promised you an epic
And now you have robbed me
You have reduced me to rubble
This concerto ends

(Recommended by Priya Sahni)

KALI

By Rukmini Bhaya Nair

A goddess chews on myth
As other women might on paan
Red juices stain her mouth.

Bored by her own powers
Immense and spectral, Kali broods
About Shiva, she is perverse.

She will not plead with him
Nor reveal Ganesha?s birth
She will not ask him home.

Shiva loves her, but absences
And apsaras are natural to him
No god is hampered by his sins.

Kali desires a mortal, whose day
Begins with her, ends at nightfall
In her arms, a man who will die

Without her, whose love is fallible
But secure, she wants to be held
Like a warm creature, not a fable.

Loneliness drives this goddess mad
She is vagrant, her limbs askew
She begs a mate, her hair unmade.

Fickle as Shiva, memory deserts her
Chandi or Durga or Parvati, which
Is she, which of her selves weeps here?

Even Ganesha, for whom she feels
Only tenderness, excludes her, even he
Seems impatient with her flaws.

Where should such a goddess turn?
Kali, mistress of the temporal worlds
Wants bliss defined in human terms.

Staid Ganesha knows this wildness
Must be curbed, Shiva, peripatetic
Agrees, and across the wilderness

Both gift Kali a companion eagle, hurt
By no arrow, fed on nothing, it returns
Each night to its eyrie in her heart.

(Recommended by Siddhartha Singh)

THE POET

By P. Lal

For all his wild hair like an aureole,
Stammer at parties, slipping from a tram,
Putting off the mending of a sole,
And putting on a mock-heroic Damn!,
He notices the spider's intestines
Claim harlot, smuggler and blackmarketeer,
And in the clicking grin his eye divines
A moody world of artifice and fear.

Above all, this: When a woman turns
Black clouds of hair, with a rhythmic hand
Weaving their silk in the possessive sun,
He sees her common eyes stretch to a land
O lost, lost; as when repentance yearns
For hope,and love, and finds that there is none.

(Recommended by Sandhya)

LOOKING THROUGH WELL WATER

By Meena Alexander

I hear grandmother singing,
she is singing in well water
I see her face as the waves stir
over cloudy white pebbles.

At the well's mouth
fern fronds dark as hair
on an infant skull
nibble into stone.

She didn't give birth to me
but when I look into the well
it's her face I see, slight
freckled bones bent into water.

I'll tell you what divides us:
a ridge of cloud, two oceans,
a winter in my fireless room
high above Van Cortlandt Park
also death, the darkest water
crashing through pebbles, fern
fronds, bits of speckled shell.

I hear the koil crying in well water
its beak is glazed with blood
it's tilted on a nest of clouds
afloat and burning.

(Recommended by Prashant Singh)

IN MEMORY OF BEGUM AKHTAR

(d. 30 October 1974)
By Agha Sahid Ali

1

Your death in every paper,
boxed in the black and white
of photographs, obituaries,

the sky warm, blue, ordinary,
no hint of calamity,

no room for sobs,
even between the lines.

I wish to talk of the end of the world.

2

Do your fingers still scale the hungry
Bhairavi, or simply the muddy shroud?

Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow,
sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you.
She wears her grief, a moon-soaked white,
corners the sky into disbelief.

You've finally polished catastrophe,
the note you seasoned with decades
of Ghalib, Mir, Faiz:

I innovate on a note-less raga.

3

Exiling you to cold mud,
your coffin, stupid and white,
astounds by its ignorance.

It wears its blank pride,
defleshing the nomad's echo.
I follow you to the earth's claw,

shouldering time's shadow.
This is history's bitter arrogance,
this moment of the bone's freedom.

4

One cannot cross-examine the dead,

but I've taken the circumstantial evidence,
your records, pictures, tapes,
and offered a careless testimony.

I wish to summon you in defence,
but the grave's damp and cold, now when
Malhar longs to stitch the rain,

wrap you in its notes: you elude
completely. The rain doesn't speak,
and life, once again, closes in,

reasserting this earth where the air
meets in a season of grief.

(for Saleem Kidwai)
(Recommended by Sunaina Agarwal)

EXPERIENCE

By Anna Sujatha Mathai

When I was a child
I thought as a child
I spoke as a child...
And then my mother sought to protect me
from experience ... and possibilities of pain.
From running through dark streets
at night, alone,
from holding up the face
to rain in ecstasy,
from rolling in the grass in a mad joy
after the summer's heat
at the burst of the monsoon.
She counselled prudence and good sense
to me, whose blood was fire.
Her cautions were cold water upon my body,
filled with desire,
longing for love and joy.
Let me be burnt, I cried, in that fire.
Leave me alone,
more childishly I said.

Today ... I am free to run
through streets at night,
and sing the moon my song of agony.
But joy lives in another country.
Besides, the great yearning is dead.
Desire and opportunity rarely coincide.

(Recommended by Mrityunjaya Kumar)

STAIN

By Smita Agarwal

A monsoon month. A grey unbroken sky,
heavy with clouds. Under a croton I'm
grafting. I whittle away half an inch
of hide, expose the xylem dull-white
as bone. Apply hormone powder, dress
the wound with moss, wrap a piece of
plastic, secure it with twine. I'll
wait a fortnight for the sap to
weave roots for the clone.

I come in for a bath. Undress, gape at
my blouse. A russet stain on the left
shoulder. Plant juice surreptitiously
seeped into the fabric, spread, took on
its texture. Scrubbing with soap and
water, using a mild stain remover,
brighten the colour; firming up a faith
in the ineffable bonding power of chemistry.

(Recommended by Seema Tewary)

MADRAS CENTRAL

By Vijay Nambisan

The black train pulls in at the platform,
Hissing into silence like hot steel in water.
Tell the porters not to be so precipitate-
It is good, after a desperate journey,
To rest a moment with your perils upon you.

The long rails recline into a distance
Where tomorrow will come before I know it.
I cannot be in two places at once:
That is axiomatic. Come, we will go and drink
A filthy cup of tea in a filthy restaurant.

It is difficult to relax. But my head spins
Slower and slower as the journey recedes.
I do not think I shall smoke a cigarette now.
Time enough for that. Let me make sure first
For the hundredth time, that everything's complete.

My wallet's in my pocket; the white nylon bag
With the papers safe in its lining-fine;
The book and my notes are in the outside pocket;
The brown case is here with all its straps secure.
I have everything I began the journey with,

And also a memory of my setting out
When I was confused, so confused. Terrifying
To think we have such power to alter our states,
Order comings and goings: know where we're not wanted
And carry our unwantedness somewhere else.

(Recommended by Shilpa Patel)

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