Image: courtesy Shalla Magazine
Friday, December 18, 2009
Poem in Shalla Magazine's print issue
My poem is included in the Winter Blooms print issue of SHALLA MAGAZINE. Here's the cover with the name of yours truly with other eminent ones. Will post more on this later.
Monday, December 14, 2009
3 Poems in Unsere Winterreise -- A Danse Macabre Poetic Collaboration
Did you read my poetic takes on Wilhelm Müller and Franz Schubert's grand collection known as Winterreise (Winter Journey) which is a cycle of 24 poems in all?
Well then, rush off to Danse Macabre literary journal to read about this wonderful collaboration between several poets to write along the themes in those 24 pieces.
The themes on which I wrote 3 poems were (harking back to my dear man-river Brahmaputra in Assam; my first snowy winter in the US, and an interesting look at ravens/crows that behave absolutely the same way anywhere in the world... !):
-- Auf dem Flusse (On the Stream)
The river, usually busy and bubbling, is locked in frozen darkness and lies drearily spread out under the ice. He will write her name, and the date of their first meeting, in the ice with a sharp stone. The river is a likeness of his heart: it beats and swells under the hard frozen surface.
The River on a Pyre
Eyeing the Brahmaputra flowing with its whale-body
and the faraway banks smoking
she thought death stood quiet
quietly performing the ritual
of mouth-fire for her own,
the bodies that once talked
laughed and spread guile.
Eyeing the strong-arm river’s sweep of red ripples
carrying unsuspecting dolphins
and last night’s smoky limbs
from the pyres she watched
across her verandah over the
winter’s damp dribble.
She searched out the smell –
ashes in the wind stuck like the stunned river’s pride
the look of a living face smoke-screened in the twilight.
-- Einsamkeit (Loneliness/Solitude)
Wintered Hourglass
First a feather floats in
does a swirling dance around the lawn
then it drops, softly in my foreign home
one by one
they come to invade
the throbbing serenity
around the little playground, swings and all
knowing kids are asleep, dreaming of riding over white slopes
And they tiptoe, little elves
remind me of the lanky cotton thrashing man who
traversed our hometown streets in summer’s white heat
when called, he set up
a white storm with
cotton for quilts
We loved the magician’s ruse
soft downy puffs flew out
helter-skelter from his old brown gunny bag
with musical whippings he caught hold of each –
one by one
then they swirled and swept
tamed tots
his veined swarthy hands twanged on
The rhythm sang an ode to the floral dance
white and careless, while they dropped
kittens on the loose, all over
the roof, a fidgety fleet
now outside my
lonely doorstep it is all fluffy, full and laden
Wait, the next eager batch rushes in
around the porch, driveway, my little garden seat
they take over the yard
beckon me in this cool shale-
colored noon
where the only music is their descent
they drop float fly
one by one.
-- Die Krähe (The Crow)
Conversation
Ravens talking in earnest is wondrous
The way they don’t want to share food
And are hyperbolic about their flights
Across fallow farmlands, brown fields
Of spent ammonia, and gassy old bogs.
They have compass heads, curt motions
When they talk, ignoring the mauve sky
Of the thunder-bound clouds over a lawn.
Ravens like a drink or two with a peck
Here and there while the light dances
On their twisty heads, darkening against
A screen of sunset silk with no outlets
For ravens to fly out. So they just spar over
How many worms each of them clinched
Or how long then can keep me company
The ravens talk through my unvoiced gaze.
A familiar sight, but who’ll question them
About melting as silhouettes on our eves –
Not a good thing confronting those beaks.
Ravens herald guests. So for my granny’s sake
I have to wait and watch, although all I see
Them dropping from their mouth’s corners
Is rotten stuff in their callous cawing prose.
Read my friend Priti Aisola's X-mas essay in Danse Macabre here.
And NEWS! I am to be Editor (India) at Danse Macabre, and work to promote the journal's broad international appeal.
Well then, rush off to Danse Macabre literary journal to read about this wonderful collaboration between several poets to write along the themes in those 24 pieces.
The themes on which I wrote 3 poems were (harking back to my dear man-river Brahmaputra in Assam; my first snowy winter in the US, and an interesting look at ravens/crows that behave absolutely the same way anywhere in the world... !):
-- Auf dem Flusse (On the Stream)
The river, usually busy and bubbling, is locked in frozen darkness and lies drearily spread out under the ice. He will write her name, and the date of their first meeting, in the ice with a sharp stone. The river is a likeness of his heart: it beats and swells under the hard frozen surface.
The River on a Pyre
Eyeing the Brahmaputra flowing with its whale-body
and the faraway banks smoking
she thought death stood quiet
quietly performing the ritual
of mouth-fire for her own,
the bodies that once talked
laughed and spread guile.
Eyeing the strong-arm river’s sweep of red ripples
carrying unsuspecting dolphins
and last night’s smoky limbs
from the pyres she watched
across her verandah over the
winter’s damp dribble.
She searched out the smell –
ashes in the wind stuck like the stunned river’s pride
the look of a living face smoke-screened in the twilight.
-- Einsamkeit (Loneliness/Solitude)
He wanders along the busy road ungreeted. Why is the sky so calm and the world so bright? Even in the tempest he was not so lonely as this.
Wintered Hourglass
First a feather floats in
does a swirling dance around the lawn
then it drops, softly in my foreign home
one by one
they come to invade
the throbbing serenity
around the little playground, swings and all
knowing kids are asleep, dreaming of riding over white slopes
And they tiptoe, little elves
remind me of the lanky cotton thrashing man who
traversed our hometown streets in summer’s white heat
when called, he set up
a white storm with
cotton for quilts
We loved the magician’s ruse
soft downy puffs flew out
helter-skelter from his old brown gunny bag
with musical whippings he caught hold of each –
one by one
then they swirled and swept
tamed tots
his veined swarthy hands twanged on
The rhythm sang an ode to the floral dance
white and careless, while they dropped
kittens on the loose, all over
the roof, a fidgety fleet
now outside my
lonely doorstep it is all fluffy, full and laden
Wait, the next eager batch rushes in
around the porch, driveway, my little garden seat
they take over the yard
beckon me in this cool shale-
colored noon
where the only music is their descent
they drop float fly
one by one.
-- Die Krähe (The Crow)
A crow has followed him all along the way from the town. Is it waiting for him to die, so that it can eat him? It won't be long, let it keep him company to the end.
Conversation
Ravens talking in earnest is wondrous
The way they don’t want to share food
And are hyperbolic about their flights
Across fallow farmlands, brown fields
Of spent ammonia, and gassy old bogs.
They have compass heads, curt motions
When they talk, ignoring the mauve sky
Of the thunder-bound clouds over a lawn.
Ravens like a drink or two with a peck
Here and there while the light dances
On their twisty heads, darkening against
A screen of sunset silk with no outlets
For ravens to fly out. So they just spar over
How many worms each of them clinched
Or how long then can keep me company
The ravens talk through my unvoiced gaze.
A familiar sight, but who’ll question them
About melting as silhouettes on our eves –
Not a good thing confronting those beaks.
Ravens herald guests. So for my granny’s sake
I have to wait and watch, although all I see
Them dropping from their mouth’s corners
Is rotten stuff in their callous cawing prose.
Read my friend Priti Aisola's X-mas essay in Danse Macabre here.
And NEWS! I am to be Editor (India) at Danse Macabre, and work to promote the journal's broad international appeal.
Image: River Brahmaputra in Guwahati, Assam; pictures from my computer.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
5 Poems in OMEGA 7--Assam-Bengal Legacies as I see Them
OMEGA 7 journal (Howling Dog Press) has been released (November, 2009). Five new poems of mine are featured among the many wonderful ones from an array of writers. The magazine, completely edited and designed by Michael Annis who selected the accompanying artwork by Henry Avignon, in one word, is stunning! Read my poems from Pg 190-193 here.
The five titles are:
"Sukanta" harks to the poet from Bengal I devoured as a teenager. For a hugely talented writer who passed away at 21, just a few months before India gained Independence in 1947, Sukanta Bhattacharya's voice was a clarion call to arrest imperialism, capitalism and warmongering (I use this word in my poem to a slight objection from poet and friend Nikesh Murali, but he said the poem was otherwise fantastic!).
Last but not the least, "History Lessons..." is almost personal history. My father was a young 'political prisoner' in Rajshahi Central Jail (in the erstwhile East Pakistan) for Leftwing activities. A firing was ordered on April 24, 1950, to quell unrest among the inmates. Seven died and several were injured in that tragedy, among them my father. Read the account in his post "Twentyfourth April". He blogs at Old Man River.
In a salute to my twin legacies I'm posting these two poems out of the five here:
The five titles are:
- Dead River Longings
- For Sukanta
- Questionnaire
- History Lessons: 1950
- The Korobi Song
No. 1 and 4 are Assam-themed. Insurgency and civil unrest cannot escape any writer who has grown up in Assam in the 1980s and 90s. "Dead River..." and "Korobi" are testimonies to that fact. Terrorism, secret killings, abduction, muffling free voices -- much before the global media started hyping up their own stories, Assam has been experiencing all of that. And even today, Assam, and most of northeastern India, remain scarred. Born and brought up in Guwahati, Assam, to me these moments in history never leave my consciousness.
"Sukanta" harks to the poet from Bengal I devoured as a teenager. For a hugely talented writer who passed away at 21, just a few months before India gained Independence in 1947, Sukanta Bhattacharya's voice was a clarion call to arrest imperialism, capitalism and warmongering (I use this word in my poem to a slight objection from poet and friend Nikesh Murali, but he said the poem was otherwise fantastic!).
Last but not the least, "History Lessons..." is almost personal history. My father was a young 'political prisoner' in Rajshahi Central Jail (in the erstwhile East Pakistan) for Leftwing activities. A firing was ordered on April 24, 1950, to quell unrest among the inmates. Seven died and several were injured in that tragedy, among them my father. Read the account in his post "Twentyfourth April". He blogs at Old Man River.
In a salute to my twin legacies I'm posting these two poems out of the five here:
History Lessons: 1950
From rag-wearing villages
of Bengal, they crossed mustard fields, dark
swamps, small rivers in crowded
ferries with a bit of Mars attached
to bodies, a crater from that 1950’s day
of becoming history books
when they rattled
metal bowls & glasses
told the masters there won’t
be any compromise.
Won’t listen
Won’t eat
Will want
all rights to be restored
to dialogue, to be heard
they spoke & they smirked
handholding their tiny fates.
They stood behind iron bars
with backs to a faded
wall uninvaded. Stood in a
Eight by eight
Feet cell, angry
Tired as hell
That was when, his cheeks
smelled of fresh lime leaves
the beard on his chin grew hard
like lotus stalk the soldiers knew
from childhood (they swam with
them in lotus ponds), yet
they fired. Left uprooted trees,
piles of jellyfish drying on a deserted
seashore. The molten moon falling in
a swift swipe, between porous
pebble & muck, he saw
the inside of his thigh a Martian
blotch. A bullet. A red-hot cave of
history lessons the land still hides.
(From my father’s recounting of the 1950 Rajshahi Jail Uprising in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, where he was one of the participants)
Dead River Longings
That was a poet who pined for a sickle-curved river
Golden perhaps or emitting a glitter through its ripples
The river name evoked glinted crop crowns; he wrote about
Jade paddy fields sliced by crow yells and bloodied streams.
That was a poet who walked the morose city streets alone
Uttering words usually unspeaking, like flow and tide;
In stumps of concrete habitats he did graffiti of a rising sea.
In such forgetfulness, some say drunken stupor, he died
Cut by a car when street cleaners came dusting the morning.
Or was he beaten unconscious and thrown by the police?
Out on the dirt, because the bugger wouldn’t stop chanting
About his mist-shadowed river of dying ivory dolphins
That buried incoherent songs in soft mud made softer by
Human waste. What haste hides is that he came back after
Moon’s wane, on his lips: that river, ujani, is still my bride.
From rag-wearing villages
of Bengal, they crossed mustard fields, dark
swamps, small rivers in crowded
ferries with a bit of Mars attached
to bodies, a crater from that 1950’s day
of becoming history books
when they rattled
metal bowls & glasses
told the masters there won’t
be any compromise.
Won’t listen
Won’t eat
Will want
all rights to be restored
to dialogue, to be heard
they spoke & they smirked
handholding their tiny fates.
They stood behind iron bars
with backs to a faded
wall uninvaded. Stood in a
Eight by eight
Feet cell, angry
Tired as hell
That was when, his cheeks
smelled of fresh lime leaves
the beard on his chin grew hard
like lotus stalk the soldiers knew
from childhood (they swam with
them in lotus ponds), yet
they fired. Left uprooted trees,
piles of jellyfish drying on a deserted
seashore. The molten moon falling in
a swift swipe, between porous
pebble & muck, he saw
the inside of his thigh a Martian
blotch. A bullet. A red-hot cave of
history lessons the land still hides.
(From my father’s recounting of the 1950 Rajshahi Jail Uprising in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, where he was one of the participants)
Dead River Longings
That was a poet who pined for a sickle-curved river
Golden perhaps or emitting a glitter through its ripples
The river name evoked glinted crop crowns; he wrote about
Jade paddy fields sliced by crow yells and bloodied streams.
That was a poet who walked the morose city streets alone
Uttering words usually unspeaking, like flow and tide;
In stumps of concrete habitats he did graffiti of a rising sea.
In such forgetfulness, some say drunken stupor, he died
Cut by a car when street cleaners came dusting the morning.
Or was he beaten unconscious and thrown by the police?
Out on the dirt, because the bugger wouldn’t stop chanting
About his mist-shadowed river of dying ivory dolphins
That buried incoherent songs in soft mud made softer by
Human waste. What haste hides is that he came back after
Moon’s wane, on his lips: that river, ujani, is still my bride.
NOTE: The poem "Questionnaire" is a legacy of my own global mishmash!
Image from the Internet: Sukanta Bhattacharya; Korobi or yellow oleander.
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