PRIZE MONEY
Anyway, my cash award for a 2nd prize awarded by the Open Space-HarperCollins-India Poetry Contest 2008 arrived. Some silver lining. Or is it?
Anyway, my cash award for a 2nd prize awarded by the Open Space-HarperCollins-India Poetry Contest 2008 arrived. Some silver lining. Or is it?
POEM IN PIRENE'S FOUNTAIN
Pirene's Fountain - A Journal of Poetry has published my work in their summer edition. You can read the journal online at Current Issue. My poem is titled "A Soothsayer's Dilemma" and can be read at Nabina Das. My favorites Mark Doty, Linda Pastan, Pume Perl among others are published in PF.
Here's the poem in case you just can't visit the strikingly beautiful website (http://pirenesfountain.com/current_issue/das_nabina.html):
A Soothsayer’s Dilemma
When she said prophecies make the sky spin like a roulette table, she meant while taking chances, they reach the end of palpability, each courting a few unexplored desires
She said prophecies would let their winding hands circle my fleshy roots, digging amply inside Apollo’s oracles, welcoming a change in spring’s sparkled honeyed light
I asked if future is a scene, a fĂȘte where men and women bestow abhaya; laugh. Because they’re shown grand, animated, in prints of red and Sepia tones in books of prophecies
She said because we can’t read future we melt inside our tacky floors hopelessly shelled with sleep’s call, but they still come the prophecies, like soft footfalls and infantile taps
My mother’s disbelief, when I said prophecies invade my bark before turning it into the ark when new rivers depths unknown are created, seemed like a verse. Prophetic overtures.
PF reproduced Gustave Klimt's MEDICINE with my poem, much to my surprise and liking. I copy it here.
