Category: Poetry

Categories
Poetry

Double dread

By Madhu Srivastaw

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Corona cries all around

Amphan raged destruction             

Yet I am me

Living on day to day

Settling my daily scores

Domestic, parental chores

Transferred money to PM fund

Gave food to beggar that came home

Wrote a poem or two

As Amphan screeched it’s belly out

Wrenching people’s life in tears

Rendered roofless by a spat of wind

Precious trees breathing life

Uprooted, broken, lying low

Immersed in darkness of night

With cyclone screaming raging rife

I kept the kids with me in bed

Diverting them in singing sprees

My mother with her heart in mouth

Kept her fingers clasped in prayers!

It diminished slowly…flew apart

Taking away our comforts fast

Electricity snapped; network gone

At least we had our homes intact

Yet we cribbed, sulked, complained

Though hundreds had lost their homes

Torn apart by Amphan’s fury

Coastal areas lost their lives

Electric poles all headlong down

Uprooted shrivelled trees abound

Government help haplessly seek

Only God can save us now

As though Corona was not enough

He sent Amphan to double the dread!

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Madhu Sriwastav is Assistant Professor of English. She is based in Kolkata. She is a poet, translator, critic and reviewer. She has published poems in various national and international journals and anthologies. She has performed poetry in several poetry festivals. She writes on anything that touches her. She is working on her upcoming book of poems.

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Categories
Poetry

The World is Sneezing

By Ndue Ukaj

The world is sneezing The world is sneezing in front of a virus that has bound the earth and shakes it like a light toy. People are panting like dogs after a long and aimless journey. Everyone panting, and behind walls they compose a symphony of fear. Ahead of us, more scary walls and glum news. The planet - like a trembling heart - is shuttered and is listening to lightning. Tonight, the moon was beautiful but in the light of her face I saw the troubled eyes of a weary world. The day was sunny too. I was sitting in the back seat of a car snaking through silence and fear and I saw nature breathing without humans. The clockwise are slow now. Girls take their time getting out of their pajamas. Women say their rosaries for new time. And men like me are terrified in front of the black glass. (Also terrified are those who sit in huge castles and on high thrones.) Beyond is silence like a raging ocean where ships drown with longing - and prisoners see Eden burning. The clockwise move slowly now. The news spreads fear faster than the virus. One counts the hours of life ahead and sees the final destination - death. Younger ones pant like tired dogs and put out cigarettes in their burning hands. Children fill sacks with toys and, confused, wait for a new day. But there are also those who don´t need clocks and calendars: that old man sitting under his beloved tree, doctors who fight to save more lives. Groups of reporters roam, like the wind that warns of worsening weather. Bad news is growing they say because some people have closed their windows on good news. The media is full of sadnesses and troubling reports overflowing with viruses and microbes. Humanity sneezes anxiously. In this long night of frightening darkness. I sit in the back seat and watch the evil hearted sneeze but also hear kindhearted voices confessing on the altar of forgiveness. But when the cathedral bells ring everyone turns their eyes to heaven. They sneeze again and pant, and pray that tomorrow the world will get better and celebrate a great mass of love. Laura’s Sunday In her city there is a ruined cathedral in the midst of ruins its choir is missing and there is an “Ave Maria” song. On the road edges, stones relieve pain only the choir traces are together with dry flower bouquets There are many dogs, and trash There is a large piano without its proper place. In her city there is a ruined cathedral longing for bells’ sounds to awaken her she wears a beautiful dress, whispers Ave Maria in solitude. She has a sweet voice, every Sunday she goes into the ruins, talks with stones, with flowers that do not blossom easy Through ruins and wipes her happy eyes without trying the voice in a choir. It is Sunday and her delighted eye is resting She sings Ave Maria in solitude. With an eraser of love she erases time’s invoice which leaves behind while gathering her hands over her pretty breasts, in silence opens the new page and writes a senseless verse. It is Sunday she is awakened while dreaming a love temple and song sounds. Ave Maria is alive! and waits for nature to become prettier, the same as a flower is prettier with all its beauty, and to join the choir of life. She walks over the ruins of the cathedral and lights a candle her pretty knees touch the solid stones.

Ndue Ukaj (1977) is an Albanian writer, publicist and literary critic.
His poems has been included in several anthologies of poetry, in Albanian, and other languages. He has published several books, including Godo is not coming, which won the national award for best book of poetry published in 2010 in Kosovo. He has also won the award for best poems in the International Poetry Festival in Macedonia and another prize. His poems and texts are translated into English, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish and Chinese. Ukaj is member of Swedish PEN.

Categories
Poetry

Karma

By Bibek Adhikari

Words dribble down from the corners
of your mouth. From within the temple, 

gods tremble with your frosty voice —
they now need a glass of moonshine.

The night is paused on LED screens.

The quietness of eating alone
in this rented room is too loud to bear.

Someone screeches—
a staccato bark of madness.
Is it your heartbeat?

There is pain that seeks its way out
through the crack in your heart.

This too shall pass as time goes by.

The overhead yellow light is on —
you are by yourself at the dinner table.

Pick up the pen, bleed poetry.

Bibek Adhikari is a poet and critic based in Kathmandu. A full-time technical writer for Deerwalk Inc., he divides his time between poetry and ‘unpoetic’ documentation. His poems and narratives have been published in some prints and online publications, including The Kathmandu Post, República Daily, and Annapurna Express. Currently, he’s working on his manuscript of poems.

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Categories
Poetry

No Warplane Has Ever Flown Like A Bird

(Translation of Karunakaran‘s Pakshi Pole Parannittilla Oru Yuddhavimanavum by Aditya Shankar)

Karunakaran
No Warplane Has Ever Flown Like A Bird No warplane has ever flown like a bird, has lost way like a bird, has halted mid-flight reminiscing a bygone aroma. A warplane has flown evoking a rage, beside a war-goddess-shaped cloud grunting in the memory of a rage, like an animal. Not that, a warplane has ever flown like a bird.

Karunakaran is a novelist, poet and story writer hailing from Pattambi, Kerala. Published works: Makarathil Paranjath(Stories, Pathabedham), Kochiyile Nalla Sthree(Stories, Sign Books), Paayakkappal (Stories, DC Books), Ekanthathayekkurich Paranj Kettittalle Ulloo (Stories, DC Books), Athikupithanaaya Kuttanveshakanum Mattu Kadhakalum (Stories, DC Books), Parasyajeevitham (Novella, DC Books), Bicycle Thief (Novel, Mathrubhumi Books), Yuddhakalathe Nunakalum Marakkombile Kaakkayum (Novel, DC Books), Yuvaavayirunna Onpathu Varsham (DC Books), Yakshiyum Cycle Yathrakkaranum (Poems, Green Books), Udal Enna Moham (Essays, Logos Books.

Aditya Shankar is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominated Indian poet, flash fiction author, and translator. His work has appeared in international journals and anthologies of repute and translated into Malayalam and Arabic. Books: After Seeing (2006), Party Poopers (2014), and XXL (Dhauli Books, 2018). He lives in Bangalore, India.

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Categories
Poetry

Love Poems

By Dr Rumpa Das

Love 2020

Nowadays,
I don’t go anywhere near where you live –
Spring is elsewhere.
The flowers in your garden have wilted,
Creepers seek out fresh pastures,
They want to live and foster
Away from the putrefying aura
Your late love spreads.
My hesitant plant-heart
Fearful of renewed assault,
However, has shown grit.
Out of heaps of deep damp memories
It has blossomed forth
Into confident young greenery.
Fresh wafts of breeze blow
In my mind, and show —
How old love and betrayal
Can be great fodder for a brave new life.

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Love beyond 2020

So you love me?
Just as the blue-green hillside
Loves the northern breeze
That smells of wild lilacs, rhododendrons
And the tales of throttled  lives
Which rolled over the precipice?
So you love me –
Because once upon a time
Your arms entwined mine
In a tepid moist embrace?
In a room that smelled of wine, cologne and deceit,
Even as a thousand flowers blossomed
To consecrate our love,
And a thousand incense sticks  burned themselves,
In solidarity with fruitless passion.
So, you love me still?
Even as I adjust a strand of unruly silver-grey hair
Behind  my  rimless glasses
And you look deep into
My eyes that smoked still
Of kohl , tears and long-lost promises.

Love isn’t love that alters, when it alteration finds.

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Dr Rumpa Das, an alumnus of Dept of English, Jadavpur University, is Principal,  Maheshtala College, Kolkata. She has taught English for over two decades. She was former Deputy Secretary (Academic) at the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education. She has published widely in India & abroad, and spoken in more than thirty international, national & state-level seminars and conferences. Her areas of interest are Gender, Media and Culture Studies. She is  a poet, creative writer  and a reviewer.

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Categories
Poetry

Love in the times of quarantine

By Amrita Sharma

Prologue

Your confessions never mattered,

Your agreement was never my call,

Your choices never governed mine,

Your confusions were born out of your own mind.

Your perfection was never my necessity,

Your insecurities were never my concern,

Your impatience was not my drive,

Your anger was not fuelling my life.

Your comfort was never my hope,

Your peace was not a part of my shopping list,

Your charm never made me insecure,

Your happiness was always yours.

Scene I

Something tells me it might possibly be a dream

It shall be over with a wink

With nothing changed.

Scene II

There is a new word we learnt— ‘quarantine’— and the television news now begins to alarm,

But I have stumbled upon your ‘presence’ somehow,

Now it’s a newer world within a changing time.

Scene III

The possibilities of an end finally liberate me from my fears

And I dare to embrace you in my thoughts,

For I know we would never step out of our houses and ever meet.

Scene IV

Your voice is enough to calm my nerves,

Your smile is enough to take me to mine,

Your presence within my smartphone suffices my quarantine.

Epilogue

With no promises of future,

Escaping the dreads of the present time,

The most beautiful of its kind was perhaps,

An encounter with love in the times of quarantine.

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Amrita Sharma is a Lucknow based writer currently pursuing her Ph.D. in English from the University of Lucknow. Her works have previously been published in Café Dissensus Everyday, Muse India, New Academia, GNOSIS, Dialogue, The Criterion, Episteme and Ashvamegh. Her area of research includes avant-garde poetics and innovative writings in the cyber space.

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Categories
Poetry

Following the white griffin’s trail & more….

By Stefan Markovski

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Following the white griffin’s trail

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In a body of demigod beast imperial shadows of chthonic forces douse

kingdoms united into the singularity of all beings

become golden ruins under steel-feathered wings

in an incense smoke sighs are clothed through which gods send answers

when you pass through tunnels of glass hope

virgin blood supplies your cells.

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A griffin pierces far into the heavens in search for

a magnificent day for a perfect melancholy.

Everyone knows, few believe that the blank in each whiteness

holds the most colorful rainbow sewed up in a full stop

the well in which the souls drown

suggests an illusion of all destinies buried into a tunnel with one exit

where the celestial blueness reflects off the lonely trains’ glass.

Asian winds blow statues of flesh

before showing you the way to the only truth — downward

all the definitions of joy and wisdom are carrying explosive 

waiting for its moment in front of faces yet to blush.

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The rain is rage of myriad of mirrors and swords

they guard the innocence of the land pieces between us

and the magic of the air with taste of white birds

black hounds chase the moon at dusk

and, hiding behind the mountains,

bark with a lion’s roar

then the night sculpts new tunnels of hope from itself

hope undefiled as an intact wine bottle pointing the way.

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A short history of а fireproof purity

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Exhaustion is a time not passing,

be patient and leave, it could be that you’ll taste natural paradises again,

you extinguish by a prayer mortals, hasting to become rivers,

your eyes, never touched

are enough to the fields, with or without water

to hatch them and offer to the red-shining skies

O, flames, evaporating heretical thoughts painted into a body,

only you, you give birth to purity identical to that of a new flesh,

novum and spiritum novum tribuam in carnem potest,

every birth is a new path to Thinking,

ora pro nobis,

every craftsman, saint and sage, every bishop of exorcisms, every celestial clown and every mage

builds white pain in Snow White’s snow,

ora pro nobis peccatoribus,

and the truths shall remain One.

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Stefan Markovski was born in Gevgelija, where he completed primary and secondary education. Graduated on both the Department of Comparative Literature and the Institute of Philosophy and obtained MA in Screenwriting at the state university in Skopje, Macedonia. He has won domestic and foreign literary awards for his novels, short stories and poetry and has been included in numerous anthologies of contemporary literature, he has participated at literary festivals, and his works have been published in over 20 languages.

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Categories
Poetry

Will There Be?

 By Amrita Saikia

I sat listening to the tap tapping of the raindrops,

And the blissful sound of the wild mountain stream,

I smelled the pure and pristine air of the valley,

Laden with the sweet scent of orchids,

The ones blooming near the lush green fields.

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The golden rays of the splendid sun in the skies,

Battled their way through the magnificent clouds,

Victoriously, they landed on the bosom of mother earth,

Illuminating the raindrops on the blades of green grass,

And transforming them into thousand twinkling stars.

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A cuckoo was perched on a branch of the mango tree,

Crooning a soulful melodious tune with glee,

As the sound of the song reverberated in the skies,

And in the faraway mountains standing gloriously tall,

My heart skipped with a feeling of inexplicable joy.

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Alas! These are the memories of the bygone days,

The once sapphire skies now wear a veil of gloom,

The breeze no longer brings tales of sheer bliss,

Only helpless cries from a distance,

Cries that send a shiver down the spine.

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The gory violence swept away their homes,

And snatched away their loved ones,

They throng the camps in masses now,

And spend restless days and sleepless nights,

In anticipation of better days to arrive.

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Their innocent faces wear a look of aghast,

They have doleful eyes and deeply scarred hearts,

They have little food to fill their famished stomachs,

They have little drug to cure their deep wounds,

All they have are prayers to soothe their tormented minds.

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My heart bleeds for the helpless people,

And at the plight of my incredibly beautiful land,

Will there be peace and harmony again?

Will songs of love and unity echo in the mountains?

These few questions disturb me again and again.

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Amrita Saika is a PhD student at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. She is passionate about writing and pens down poems and short stories every now and then. Her writings are inspired by events that transpire around her. Her short story titled ‘The Unspoken Truth’ was published in New Asian Writing Online Asian Literary Community in 2014 (http://www.new-asian-writing.com/the-unspoken-truth-by-amrita-saikia/). In 2012, her first short story was selected for an anthology published by MSN and Random House.

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Categories
Poetry

The Chef

Jee Leong Koh Photo credit Mihyun Kang

By Jee Leong Koh

for Richard Chan (Yummy Tummy, Flushing, New York, March 24, 2019)

Unctuously fried oyster omelet.

Hainanese chicken rice. Sambal fish balls

pierced on a stick, as in the old night markets,

airborne kerosene lamps lisping with a flair.

Mee goreng with sliced fish cake, Chinese sausage

and egg. Bak kut teh spelled the correct way,

the way of memory, for bone meat tea.

And finally, the chef’s very own favorite,

the pièce de résistance, on which he lavished

a fiery, slurry, egg tomato sauce,

the chilli crab, made from Dungeness crabs,

in which we dig with fingers for sweet flesh.

The critics got him wrong. He has not changed

profession. He is still a travel agent.

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Jee Leong Koh is the author of Steep Tea (Carcanet), named a Best Book of the Year by UK’s Financial Times and a Finalist by Lambda Literary in the US. His latest book is Connor & Seal: A Harlem Story in 47 Poems (Sibling Rivalry). Originally from Singapore, Koh lives in New York City, where he heads the literary non-profit Singapore Unbound.

Categories
Poetry

Lockdown Blues

By Gopal Lahiri

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Sometimes there is a night you just want

to get so far away from,

fire burns out in life’s long years,

memories are plucked, timid words wipe the window

long after the moon reaches its climax.

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A strange world of quarantine is slowly

strumming with silence,

there is no paper, no blue ink —

envelopes never arrive, the inbox isn’t loaded with emails

it’s time to live with the lonely shadows.

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The archipelago of hospitals empties sad memories,

patients fighting for life with short breaths

trip letters in social distancing,

no flowers, no relatives or friends

a virus attacks inside in a different trajectory.

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The first layer of darkness hides the melody of stars

in alleys, in streets, in subways,

rewind the scene of weaning the ventilators.

many dead mothers have left their smiles over the corridor

on the margins of the white washed wall.

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Form the undulations of courage and fear

eyes stare at the distant light,

the whispers are carrying alphabets of the dead planets

lying beneath the disposable trough.

there will be another universe to live for.

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Gopal Lahiri is a Kolkata- based bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator with 20 books published 13 in English and 7 in Bengali, including three joint books. His poetry is also published in various anthologies and in eminent journals of India and abroad. His poems have been published in 12 countries and translated in 10 languages. He has been invited in several poetry festivals across India.