Inhabiting Multiple Planes
I am enamoured by the idea of inhabiting multiple planes at any given moment, an idea I explored in my collection If and I. There, I swim through the notion of the plurality of an instance. The poems question, ride and revel in the mystery of being present in different places at the same time — physically, subtly, really. This spiritual bent takes a more concrete form in my translation of the poetry of Guru Nanak (considered the founder of Sikhism) from Gurmukhi to English, verse to verse.
The Poetresse, as I am known in the virtual world, is swiftly building a new stage and script in literature and in art — opening doors for stories that so far lay buried in the wings. I believe in taking poetry to new spaces where it soars high — where literature merges with art and fashion in a collective celebration through an artistic, sensory experience.
Curly Clawing
How swiftly became
An octopus
Love
Triumphant tentacles
Gleaming gray
The kind of gray
That flows into black
Yet stays always away
On it the jelly of jealousy
Rapidly thudders, sways
Every part of that jelly seems
To have an eye of its own
Threatening to pop
Out of their spot
To claim the ones you have worn
Your memory confiscated
To be mummified
Till you cease to communicate
In the first person
You will eventually leave, stomping
Not without debate of course
Because along with hair loss
Love also gives you balls
When the naked shimmering
Melting you
Like an ion in a cathode
Bereft of dignity
Stripped of philosophy
Begging
Like an arrowless bow
Gathering the swept off
Crumbs of courage
Ask glowering
Why were you here?
Undaunted he will say
O I was just
Completing a poem
Spread
As lichen to forgotten walls
To my ancient heart you stuck
And slower than seasons
Began to grow
In every slippery spot
Before I knew it you were sprouting
In places I thought had ceased to be
Before I knew it you had spread
My concrete heart turned green
And now that you choose
To become so rare
And yourself wean
It is futile for what is left
Is also you, not me
Circular
A faux filament
This crooked crow
Announcing the imagined arrival
Of mostly feline foes
Stealthy they stumble in
On fumbling fours
And gather the spine
To leave upright
Sipping on consent
Like a common watering hole
Without a straw or opinion
A singular unauthentic goal
Anoint devour sink and throw
Are we the fallen hands of time
Abandoned as it leaves
For a place benign
With no room that allows
The soiled feet
Of the sapien mind
What Would You Rather
Had you spent
That night in my carriage
Like your legal dawn
You might have seen
The luminous essence
Of wrong
As the moon grew taller
The Tree of Nemesis
Fire eats
What to fire is owed
And we just embers
Without genders
Trying to wall
Bacterial cities
They begin to leak
From the naked eye
Bacteria that only
Poetry can see
It fails to notice
The guns and their authors
And keeps only
A repository
Of the story of their heat
Of hurt
Of the heart
The one heart
Of this world
Part perpetrator
Part suffering
Part hope
When we are alone
When we sleep
A poem is awake
Measuring the frequency
Of dawn
Of a poem we are born
Guided by a rhyme
It knows too well
This world will always be at war
A sphere from where hatred might never flee
That there will always be
Secret doors
In this war zone
To smuggle the bootlegged
Elixir of poetry
It knows what is owed to fire
Fire alone will eat
The essay and the poems are part of our Poetry Special Issue (January 2022), curated by Shireen Quadri. © The Punch Magazine. No part of this essay or the poems exclusively featured here should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.
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