Poet’s Note: ‘Poetry is about the truth of a moment’
To be honest I don’t know what to say about how one writes poetry. I was always interested in ‘verse’ — music, songs, quotes and stories. So there are numerous influences along the way to when one actually started writing a poem up to the point when this poetry was published. I think poetry is about the truth of a moment. It is ‘feeling’ and this means responding to life with your whole being. In dark times as in this period of a pandemic and global lockdown, poets across the world have responded with myriad voices, a reading of events with the inner eye conveying a sense of togetherness to protest, hope, love.
I can quote the lines of Chinese poet Jidi Majia (A-Yi) reading an ode to humankind at the online Kritya International poetry festival last August: ‘Now it’s the time when Italian tears should blur Chinese eyes. It’s the time when moans in London should make guitars in Spain whimper.... ‘
Poetry is like this — lifting the human condition with such thoughts into words where the language of the heart is the poem.
Once Upon a Time in Pasighat
For friends of a different sort
The house is unswept,
Never mind whoever comes
Bamboo leaves scraping the floor
My friends are of a different sort
If you see a fly
Do not lift your white hand, my love,
the cobweb in the corner
Will do the job
And if the town lights die
We’ll sit with the wind
Inside, outside
My friends are of a different sort
Each star has its soul
In your sleeping eyes, my love,
Dreams will rise and fall
Slowly coming to rest
When the house grows old
Tomorrow our children will know
Timelessness
With friends of their sort
Under the broad roof
Slanting beams of light
The beauty of bone
The universe on the walls.
Hello Mountain
Every morning when the forest wakes
the canopy goes for a walk
hailing the sun, courting the wind,
discussing fruit and weather
The idle moss turns into velvet,
branches make signs,
Who says there is no time?
The only thing we are given is Time
Chattering life, high above
Babel of tree dwellers,
for a seed falling so far down
to rise again, Time is a given
a foothold for the hunger of a weed,
colour, scent, camouflage
and the grass that never sleeps
Shooting up to meet the gaze of the mountain
How are you, mountain?
Is everything alright, is the earth growing old,
birds flying away, trees falling?
Green mountain wearing a rain hat
are there caves and bats in your bosom,
wedged in your folds a hum of voices celebrating
the anniversaries of birth and time —
Is a raindrop growing into a river,
a rock into a jewel?
From a new work-in-progress, tentatively titled Once Upon a Time in Pasighat
‘Hello Mountain’ was read at the Mussoorie Writers Festival in November 2020
The Desire of Ink
They say a landscape drops from heaven tangled with possibilities.
And a summer sun that directs the perfect balance
between the moment and the word
when everything falls into place.
Your laughter opens the world, creating space.
We could have diverted boats and nets
and claimed the words of the rose,
entering a house, shy as a dove,
exchanging words to help each other survive.
But words are like water, flowing away.
These floating lines — the tender scars of witness on a page,
replacement words, shaped around a hope.
Right from the start we knew how it would be.
It was about truth, or the recognition of it,
but the journey of words proved nothing.
We neither gave up nor decided anything.
In another world someone holds my hand.
My life is changing every day.
Restless, becalmed, in open water
the plume of water rising to fly
is the surrender of letters into the great circle
beyond language and the desperation of words
where the world is scalloped like a shell,
and the waves are roaring, in no direction,
turning with the growth and bend of the sun.
From Midsummer: Survival Lyrics
Floating Island
The sloping mountain is trying to reach me
stretching down into the water.
Dear one, don’t go away,
rest, rest on my shoulder.
In the floating darkness a woman is asleep
pressing her cheek on my pillow;
vivid with dreams.
The birds of summer are nesting in her breast.
Who knows which way the spinning current will spin.
Farewell blind mountain, pasted on the sky.
When the day is folded away
my heart clings to the life of water —
Into the deep, into the sea green
navigating on a heartbeat
the lilies are shooting up like swordfish,
and the woman is laughing, laughing.
From Midsummer: Survival Lyrics
The essay and the poems are part of our Poetry Special Issue (January 2021), curated by Shireen Quadri and Nawaid Anjum. © The Punch Magazine. No part of this essay or the new poems exclusively featured here should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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