I found poetry in a pandemic. Or rather it found me with a vengeance.

It is now a truism to state that poetry became a lifestyle habit in our Covid-stilted times. In the last two years, like countless others, I too have learnt to appreciate the sheer sheltering silence that poetry offers. And it happened in the most propitious way.

When Delhi imposed its first ever lockdown on March 23, 2020, I was already flush with anticipation and longing after having met a charming someone just two days earlier — on March 21. 

Images from this “date” tenaciously imprinted themselves on my mind and relief would arrive only when I bashed them out in staccato sentences which eventually took the shape of a poem. 

The first one was called “Spring-on-pause.” It recalled attractive ways of a reluctant muse with a drunk radio voice. Trapped in my fantasies, and in my desperate bid to save this one hope-instilling event from melting into inconsequence, I learnt to heave out my anguish into midnight poems. I developed a nightly ritual where I would sit myself down on a big, black couch in a living room bathed in an amber haze and write lines which would flow out organically to the accompaniment of music and wine. It helped me ease the stresses of a hard day’s work filled with office and household chores. In those early months of isolation, poetry became a zone of resilience and there has been no looking back since. In December 2020, I approached an independent literary publishing house to look at a small volume of my poems, and if they might consider publishing it as a chapbook. Hawakal Publishers accepted my manuscript and “Velvet Grapes: Drunk Midnight Poetry” was born in January 2021.

Only much later did I learn that March 21 is also celebrated as World Poetry Day! My bittersweet dalliance with this “reluctant muse” had ended by then. But Velvet Grapes almost felt like a cosmic handout, meant to reaffirm my faith in poetic justice. Poetry is now an all-weather friend who is always there every time I feel jaded, happy, anxious, or exhausted.

On most nights after office hours, I devour bits and morsels from the Poetry Foundation website or listen to podcasts like On Being or Read Me a Poem. They are calming and soporific. Sometimes I follow words brewing out of my own emotional state as prompts to search for more poems. And in the stillness of the night, I often find myself drifting and dreaming with songs which rhyme with my thoughts and fuel words onto the page. I don’t think rhymes are limiting and I like to indulge my quick-fix appetite for light verse on Instagram on a separate handle dedicated entirely to poetry. A sampler below:

I have been stocking anthologies and collected volumes of several poets and found deep resonance in the works of Wisława Szymborska, Wendy Cope, Mary Oliver, Erica Jong, Leonard Cohen and George Szirtes apart from fixating on Indian poets like Gopal Honnalgere and Arun Kolatkar. I eagerly wait for The Paris Review to declassify more poems from their archives. I scribble rhymes in between work and often edit them in the morning before starting the day. Humour in the banality of everyday life, small, sleek and precise, are themes and templates I am invariably drawn towards. And which is how I would like my poetic craft to develop and distinguish itself.

 

Small and clean always packs a hefty punch. It’s like carrying a  dainty little pocketbook of wise old maxims to live by.

Magic mush on bison poop

shrooms on my telephone too
when I suddenly dial you back

from north driverly to south tenderly
under a toffee-orange moon

sliding in and out

of big, little mushroom clouds.

I am no master of disguise,

a polka-potted terrace beams
neon lasers to the sky.

 

The birds, bees, you and I
trippy dippy butterflies

we are all but gentle callers
softly knocking,

warbling in paradise. 

A magician’s long coat
painted in chinoiserie
is satin shiny authorly.
Hasty parlour fringes
can barely conceal

the tickled eyes
that did not sleep.

Poet from Noida cancels
borders are stressed.

The music man is missing
singers can't work the tech.
You smile, sit and chomp
grilled fish, mayhem and mess.
I wait for a word on the dress.

My guest eyes a creep,
cried afoul in disbelief
when quietly brushed
with a predator’s tease
while I stomp and crib,
the bookman dismissed!
Some literary precocity.

When a friend recites,
‘Boy with a Helmet,’
The man on my right  

is pinched with fervent pleas,
‘Pray! stop her mid-flight.’
Can you pretend and clap?

Just let her say ‘butt slap!’

Swaying cheek to cheek

we spot a girl from Ipanema,
beg to be flown to the moon.
But it’s the same old jazz
operatic, all very whiplash.

I keep insisting on the sax.
It was catty and cracked.

A black and white portrait
Is my morn morn missive
A shot of double rum cola.
The upside-down goofball

Has dodgy dopamine drops;
puddles into jet black holes,
colanders and springboard.
Mucus membrane is dry again;
it's the same fluorescent rush.
The sweet slipping thrush,

a golden gateway drug. 

Oh, standard Indian flagbearer!
Bless the cell phone, a cog
in the Queen’s time zone.
How long till you call?