Tite: Forever Yours and Other Poems
Author: Swati Pal
Publisher: Hawakal Publishers
A deathly pall
Sometimes
The silence creeps up
And deafens me,
Tearing into me
Slicing through me
And mincing me to bits
.
And from every bit
Of me
A cry so dark
So desperate
So alien
Longs to burst out
That you would shudder
If you heard it.
It’s as if
In some nightmare
That once I saw
In which
My severed head
Was in my hands
But my shrieks
Could be heard
Far and wide.
.
When my eyes
Opened,
A deathly pall
Hung low over me,
Until it swallowed me whole
And we collapsed
As one
Forever.
.
To be a firefly
Oh, to be
A firefly
Dancing
In the dark,
Spreading hope
With its
Brilliant light
Even as
It is enveloped
In blinding night,
To flash
Before the eyes
And soar
Higher
Into the skies…
.
I lie awake
And pray
I become
That firefly.
.
Whilst I live,
I wish only
To spread cheer
To do good
And then
To melt
Into the ether
And be
Not remembered
Yet not forgotten,
Like the firefly…
About the Book: “The deafening silence of a loved one’s absence turns the poet into the eternal Ma enduring separation. Swati Pal’s poetry also straddles the particular to the universal theme of grief and loss and symbolically suggests compassionate ways of healing the pain … Swati Pal’s Forever Yours and Other Poems holds ajar that mysterious door to the panorama of a mother’s love, loss, grief and hope. Her poems will resonate beyond her individual story.” — Prof. Malashri Lal (Former Head, Dept of English, University of Delhi)
About the Author: Swati Pal, Professor and Principal, Janki Devi Memorial College, University of Delhi, is a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship scholar, a Charles Wallace scholar and the first Asian scholar to receive the John McGrath Theatre Studies Scholarship at Edinburgh University. Author of several books on theatre, creative and academic writing, her newspaper articles articulate her views on education. Her areas of research interest include performance studies and cultural history. She translates from Hindi to English and several of her translations have been published. She writes poetry and her poems appear in several anthologies; she also has two collections entitled In Absentia and Forever yours and a curated collection called Living On. She is the Vice Chair of the Indian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies and has been the recipient of several national and international awards, both as a teacher as well as an administrator.
Click here to read an interview with Swati Pal.
.
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