Category: Poetry

Categories
Poetry

In Quiet & Conversation

By Anasuya Bhar

In quiet

You and I have not laid our

Eyes, on each other

For days, months, now

You and I have changed,

Both to the world, and

To us, unknown.

.

Conversation

Two glasses

Sit in eager anticipation

Two chairs

Sit in mute expectation.

Twinkling lights

Empty tables, slow music

Dusk,

All wait for us –

Now drifted,

Now apart.

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Dr. Anasuya Bhar is Associate Professor of English and the Dean of Postgraduate Studies in St. Paul’s Cathedral Mission College Kolkata. She is also a Guest Faculty at the Department of English, University of Calcutta. Dr. Bhar is the sole Editor of the literary Journal Symposium http://www.spcmc.ac.in/departmental-magazine/symposium/, published by her Department. She has various academic publications to her credit. She is also keen on travel writing and poetry writing. She has her own blog https://anascornernet.wordpress.com/.

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Categories
Poetry

We, the Sojourners

By Dr Santosh Bakaya

Dr. Santosh Bakaya is an academician, poet, essayist, novelist, biographer, Ted Speaker and creative writing mentor. She has been critically acclaimed for her poetic biography of Mahatma Gandhi [Ballad of Bapu]. Her Ted Talk on the myth of Writers’ Block is very popular in creative writing Circles . She has more than ten books to her credit , her latest books are a biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (Only in Darkness can you see the Stars) and Songs of Belligerence (poetry). She runs a very popular column Morning meanderings in Learning And Creativity.com.

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Categories
Poetry

Harmony

by Christopher Manners

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Amidst the crowded cacophony of chaos,

this sweet perception fleetingly crystallized,

in these suddenly calm, pristine waters,

as I no longer perceived each ego clashing,

but a united chorus of the countless cascading

with those blazing harps of blissful harmony

trumpeting beyond all the mundane misery,

as each valiantly distinct and voyaging voice

was a dear resonance of deathless radiance

all vastly imagined by the boundless artist.

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Christopher Manners has had 2 poetry books published by Sophia Perennis.  He has also had poems published by Harbinger Asylum. Born and residing near Toronto, Canada, he has a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from York University.   Manners is the founder of poetryimmortal.com, a poetry blog and encyclopedia dedicated to the classics. 

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Categories
Poetry

Heredity

By JGeorge

The way a cracker fires up to the sky, and then blooms into scattered pieces of joy;

Like sprinkling water, is exactly how my father’s hand moves in hopelessness.

He raises his hands upwards, a little higher slowly,

and then throws his fingers from its closed bud, to the air opening up,

“Ohh…Onnulla” (Oh! Nothing) ,

with the “Ohh” dragging itself to the top and in “onnulla”, all that agitation and frustration

cracks up open, falling back to his lap.

I really don’t remember how she initiated a hug or being in her embrace,

her, she – my grandmother, his mother;

was it firmer, with left hand holding and right patting, or the other way, I wonder.

But this piece of movement, is so familiar to me, like the signature end note of a musician,

it was hers and now, I see it all growing in you, father.

The lines of worry piling up, just like the ones on your forehead;

how that lips down turn themselves, after nothing (Onnulla) and

how she turns her head sideways away from me.

All in you, I see replicated well, the worry, the anxiety,

the deep sadness dwelling behind those heavy eyelids.

She was sixty when I went to stay with her,

and now, you are in your sixties while I am here for this extended lockdown stay

and maybe it’s this inacqaintance that I notice as a bare connection.

Or maybe all I want to ask you is to open your fingers a little more widely to a hug,

and watch joy sprouting from hope, in a million faint moments around,

something she never understood.

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JGeorge’s poems appear or is forthcoming in several online and print journals, most recently in “Mookychick”, “The Initial Journal”, “Active Muse”, “TROU Lit Mag”,”Peach Street Mag”, “The Martian Chronicles”, “FishfoodMag”, anthologies of “Boundless”(Rio Grande Valley International Poetry Festival 2019) and “Love, As We Know It” (Delhi Poetry Slam). Currently, she lives in Pondicherry, pursuing research at Pondicherry University.

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Categories
Poetry

Resurrection & more…

                                     

By Aneek Chatterjee

Resurrection       

Some issues are so puzzling …

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Often I ask myself, where does the

mind stay …

In the brain, the heart or the eyes

or in the thin layer of the skin

when a touch ignites

irresistible passion

.

and I get more confused … 

.

When I look up, clouds

paint me words, images,

I lost in a forest of bricks 

of dingy bylanes; 

in the asphalt of avenues,

smell of markets. 

Clouds, white, black or sepia

hold me inside, and I float … 

.

I float and finally

descend down on

the skin of narrow bylanes 

And avenues;

in the heart of the city center,

And discover me there

.

Fresh as ever

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About Time & Pride                                        

Sometimes I’m ahead

of the time I yearn to be.

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The magical night laughed at me

I was at the airport, and the next

flight to Nice was in the morning,

eleven hours later. 

I didn’t know how I beat time

when I slept on the floor,

with my cabin bag as pillow and

my left hand inside the strap,

as if it contained hundred

years’ of accumulated wisdom.

I didn’t know how I beat time

and possible cheaters. 

A little drunk

and the night passed in a whimper,

aimed at transborder 

lumpens.

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In the morning, I found

my bag open, and some coins

and papers on the floor.

I picked up all and realised

these actually escaped

my powerful pocket.

I searched for my toothbrush 

and saw in the electronic board that

my dream had left for Nice.

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Howled at the beginning and

then laughed, pitied me and time

lazily at the washroom,

always my best bunker;

and waited for the next flight

eight hours later.

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I’m still ahead of my time,

yearned pride & dream.

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 Aneek Chatterjee is a poet and academic from Kolkata, India. He has been published in reputed literary magazines and poetry anthologies across the globe. His recent credits are:  Chiron Review, Shot Glass Journal, The Stray Branch, Chicago Record, Ann Arbor Review, Dissident Voice, Café Dissensus, Setu, Ethos Literay Journal, New Asian Writing, Pangolin Review, Montreal Writes, Mark Literary Review etc. He authored two poetry collections named “Seaside Myopia” & “Unborn Poems and Yellow Prison”.  Chatterjee has a ph.d. in International Relations; and has been teaching in leading Indian and foreign universities.

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Categories
Poetry

The Future Starts: The Past Departs

By A Jessie Michael

In my heart thunder, in my eyes, only clouds.

 “Here already? Here already?” asks his mother,

for hours his favorite rendang* stirring.

She is incoherent with love

and breathless from using her lungs as bellows.

My son comes home today with wife and child.

.

A man steps out of a car, not a child;

 It’s the laterite dust that our vision clouds.

He’s dressed like the city. Where is the boy I love?

Not seeing us still, “Pa!”  he echoes the buffalo’s bellows.

Then child-like, calls “Bu” in his mother-

tongue, peering thru the dust still stirring.

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The wind sets the young padi* stalks stirring;

It’s whistle like the reed flute, reduces me to child-

like sobs and I stand speechless like a love-

lorn fool as they kiss my hand. The cloud-

laden sky turns dark and heavy with a mother-

load of rain. In the paddock the buffalo bellows.

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The young child frets. “I’m hungry!” he echoes the bellow.

“I made rendang*,” proclaims his grandmother, stirring

spittle in our mouths while the mother

of all storms begins. “I want KFC” — truly a spoilt child

and for a moment my appetite clouds

till I remember that till he’s grown, KFC is puppy love

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The rain thrashes the ground, a love

offering to the padi fields, drowns the bellows

Of our lungs, conjures memory clouds

of bare bodies and muddied feet and the first stirrings

of manhood riding on the buffalo, laughing in child-

ridden delight towards his padi-harvesting earth mother.

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“Pa the roof leaks, the house creaks and this mother

earth is dying. Laterite will become tar. This love

nest will soon be concrete flats. No more child-

friendly fields, but roads with the horn bellows

of trucks and automobiles. Change is stirring.

Come with us to the city. Will you live among exhaust clouds?”

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I see the future start in this man- child trying to mother

us, clouds of grey hair mingling with mists of love.

Slow the past departs, deaf to my heart’s bellows and my soul’s stirring.

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*Rendang –aromatic  spicy meat dish with ground coconut flesh and milk, sautéed for hours.

*Padi – unhusked rice

*Bu (Ibu) – mother

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A. Jessie Michael is a retired Associate Professor of English from Malaysia and a writer of short stories and poems. She has written winning short stories for local magazines and newspaper competitions and received honourable mentions in the AsiaWeek Short Story Competitions. She has worked with writers’ groups in Melbourne, Australia and Suzhou, China. Her stories have also appeared in The Gombak Review, 22 Asian  Short Stories (2015), Bitter Root Sweet Fruit and Kitaab (2019)  She has published an anthology of short stories Snapshots, with two other writers and most recently her own anthology The Madman and Other Stories (2016).

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Categories
Poetry

These Thousand Hills

By Melissa A. Chappell

(For the 800,000 people who perished in the Rwandan genocide of 1994)

I am a Eucalyptus tree.

For a hundred years I have stood here

with my roots pressed in this Rwandan earth.

They reach down

deep,

deep into the underworld,

where life is not,

and the dead

flee away.

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My branches reach

high,

high into the heavens,

where there is

no wrong,

and death

flees away.

.

But I dwell on earth,

and what I have seen!

What I have seen!

The rain was blood

for my shamed roots,

and loathing myself,

I was made rich

by rotting flesh,

flesh that

no one claimed

because they, too,

had disappeared

into oblivion.

.

Come, Mercy, come!

Lay an axe to my trunk.

Butcher my wood

as they did the people

to whom I once

gave shade.

Set me ablaze.

Make me a holocaust

to the heavens.

Let me burn!

May my holy essence

float across

these thousand hills

.

so that none may

be forgotten,

so that none may

be forgotten.

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Come, Mercy, come!

Let me burn.

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Melissa A. Chappell is a native of South Carolina living on land passed down through her family for over 120 years. She is greatly inspired by the land and music. She plays several instruments, among them an 8 course Renaissance lute. She shares her life with her family and two miniature schnauzers. She recently published Dreams in Isolation: The World in Shadow: Poems of Reconciliation and Hope with Alien Buddha Press.

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Categories
Poetry

Pine Scent

By Mallika Bhaumik

pine_scent

A password is often a prosaic keepsake of a faded romance, sometimes perhaps an idea of a home one longs to return to.
An overcast sky, the concrete of the city recedes giving space to the smell of wet earth, a coiled creeper looks up to drink the rain,the tick-tock of time rolls down a valley that was once strewn with poetry of our younger days.
The spread of the olfactory root is an asylum, I try to draw a route map of the bottled odours, how they tiptoe in to settle down, how I grow to become a habitat.
A whiff of familiarity and I walk back to touch the whirring of an emotion ~the damp earth, orchids, rhododendrons, the whispering forest trails refreshing the sound of our footsteps from some other time; turning bodies to tangible dreams, nights to blooming cornflowers.
I am somewhat like a vagabond cloud holding in me particles of places, their smell, colours, their warm embrace.
A folder opens window to our archived youth, a dash of a fuchsia dupatta grows wings to become a firefly, brings back some pitter-patter of rain, vignettes of our Shillong days.
deep deep within
a rippling lake..
forever.pine_scent

Mallika Bhaumik has a Master’s degree in English literature from the University of Calcutta. Her works have been featured in many reputed mags like Mad Swirl, Cafe Dissensus, Oddball magazine, Shot glass journal, Kitaab, In parentheses, Stag Hill journal, Harbringer Asylum, Madras Courier, The Alipore Post to name a few. She is the author of two poetry books. Her first book,’Echoes’by Authorspress,New Delhi, has won the Reuel International award for the best debut book,2018. Her second book ‘How not to remember’ has been published by Hawakal Prokashona, Kolkata (2019). She is also a nominee for the Pushcart Prize for poetry, 2019. Her poems are included in the Post Graduate syllabus of BBKM University, Dhanbad,2020. She lives and writes from Kolkata .

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Categories
Poetry

COVID & more…

By Umesh Bajagain

COVID

The virus came

with a blow

smacked me in the face

blew me out slow

for sometime

and left.

But the world

blew out loud

with a thud

and remained.

Die In, Die Out

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The streets are empty

from the virus

and the souls are home

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I sit by a window

below a thatched top

and see the storm

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I tune in the radio

tells me to rest inside

away from the doom.

I tune in the TV

tells me to run outside

away from home.

I’m the Parrot and We’re the Parrots

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I saw the weed and the paddy.

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They stacked their feet and toes

hand in hand in their home-land
inundated in water.

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It’s August and they’re happy—

they shared their share they suck from soil,
peace in harmony but aggravated by agony.
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Are these both daughters of nature?
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I asked in muse because it’s October.

October—when anthropomorphic humans rise

from the bed of utilitarianism.  

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Saw them break the neck of the weed

and water the paddy.

Weed is no need and paddy is daddy,

they said.
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“From their roots or they will be back,”

said the man,

uprooted the weeds,

and expected the grains to grow.

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I’m the parrot and the nightingales are singing

“the blissful assonance of humans and demons”

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Then I saw a philosopher

ankle-deep amongst the sisters

philosophizing friend-foe dichotomy.
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Followed him the earth doctor;

 “Weed’s no need and grains our friends,”

who said so.

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Who would know things deep

in the anguish of orphan sisters?

But then there are humans,

more prominent.

They part them,

break the bones of the bond

and make them irrelevant.

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I’m the parrot and the nightingales are singing
“the blissful assonance of humans and demons.”

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What destiny keeps them there?

A one meant to last a flash?

Day selects weed homeless

and night strips the grains

Twice they raised them together

only to part them later?

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I’m the parrot and the nightingales are singing
“the blissful assonance of humans and demons.”

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White, green, and brown balls,

they’re fed profuse.

Are they this frail

to nourish them to nausea?

Like a slaughtering animal

nursed to its brim,

they slaughter the weed young

partly by poison,

and parting them in season.

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I’m a parrot and the nightingales are singing
“the blissful assonance of humans and demons”

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Where do these weeds come from

where they plant only the grains?

Were they there all along

waiting for their sister to show up?

And how all along is all along?

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It’s but humans

who treasure precedence and succession,

value estrangement,

who mend the rules of nature.

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I’m a lone dead parrot.

We are lone dead parrots.

And the nightingales are gone.

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Umesh Bajagain has been a Science and English Educator for twelve years. Also an editor by profession, he likes to call himself a short story writer by-choice and poet by-chance. Humour, Satire and Dark are his areas of interest. He is also a budding translator and a ghost author for various publications. His works have been published in local English dailies and had been waiting for the Big Pharma of literature. Right now, he’s working on a number of short stories and poems for an anthology.

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Categories
Poetry

Cornflower Caresses

 By Srividya Sivakumar

Cornfower Caresses

In Coonoor, childhood tumbles

down a hill to find its way home. 

The cobra lily has made a comeback.

The gardens are bursting with crowds and

the commotion hurts delicate

camellia ears.

The varki is especially good

with a tumbler of cardamom tea.

The churches see more charlatans

than the courthouse.

The temples clamour for

your sleep on a cold morning.

The cold is

a man with a mind of his own.

A ghost

lives in the castle behind your house.

These hills call out to you.

And the kurunji is a perfect

lover.

It appears so rarely, almost reluctantly,

in a burst of Crayola blue.

You are a pigment of my imagination

Dearest Ma,
My earliest memories of you are loud music and your dancing and singing.

I love loud music, can sing, and try to dance.

I’m often asked what my family values are and I say — a sense of humour in adversity.

Where do you think I learnt that from, ma?
The afternoon when I was born was a cold one. The military hospital had a handsome gynaecologist and you told me that

it helped you a lot. 

From cooking experiments-cabbage transformed into rasmalai-– to mad fashion sense–including bright orange sleeveless t shirts to greet stiff-upper-lip nephews–I’ve learnt that laughter is therapy.

I laughed when a day before emergency surgery, you asked: are you sure?

I love all your deliberate malapropisms.

Your,’ present continues tense,’ and ‘juvenile delicacy.’
How draining for you is a combination of drizzling and raining. 
And how you say ‘loitering and poetering.‘
.

Ah ma, but I know.
I know you wonder sometimes why I am the way I am.

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When you struggled to drape a sari on me, I cried at the hideousness that looked back at me.         

Did you wonder ma, how could someone you created be so unkind?

When I told you about what I had done, you looked at me, askance.                                        How could the child created by many degrees be this stupid?

When you learnt of my illness, you cried because you thought it was in my genes.

Some of what I write and say worries you.
I know, ma.

But haven’t you taught me that choices are mine to make?

People say I look like dad.
Maybe true, but I hope that I am less him, more you. 

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Dr. Srividya Sivakumar, a poet, columnist and speaker, has been a teacher-trainer for twenty-one years, and has two collections of verse- The Heart is an Attic and The Blue Note. Her work appears in various journals and anthologies, including the Red River Book of Haibun VOL 1, Quesadilla and Other Adventures: Food Poems, and the Best Indian Poetry 2018. Her poem, Bamboo, was nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology in 2018. Srividya wrote a weekly column, Running on Poetry, for The Hindu’s Metroplus, for eighteen months. Her column currently appears in the journal, Narrow Road.

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