there;s nothing, nothing quite as... (Arka Mukhopadhyay)

/there's nothing, nothing quite as...
saddening as that first morning when
winter whispers into the city, and
all day, all day a wind is blowing through your mind
and through the streets of that other, secret
city whose jagged edges are remembering; for you
are an image of its trees, and like the trees
the wind picks you up in its dance and you
sway through the strange nights when something
speaks from beyond the voices of our fathers, something
sleeping in the heavy, turbid depths of the river, and
whirls us about, through the centuries,
shattering us against the silence of the stars.

/Arka's poem starts out quite strongly - somewhere around 'you are an
image of its trees' it turned to stock phrases and the wind lost its
way, and died down. 'City's jagged edges' sounds fine, but 'jagged
edges remembering' is a confusing image.

Remembering You (Ityaadi)

Every night as it passes by
Dreams of you fade away
And I grope in the dark
To keep my fears allay

I get up in the morning
With a clutching pain in the chest
Has the time come so soon?
To lay your memories to rest

When the sun rises in the sky
The birds begin to chirp and fly
I do remember of you my son
You who never let my spirits die

/The grief is crushing. I think it was 'my fears at bay' or 'my fears
allayed'.
'You who never let my spirits die' was a beautiful one-line eulogy.
/

Poem read at the Peace mela (Billi)

doodhwala, paperwala,
gaadi saaf karne wala,
istreewala, kachrawalaa,
raddiwala, baniya, and a neighbour
who wanted to borrow a hammer,
have all insistently pressed the doorbell.

tv is on at full volume
for a partially deaf mother in law
prone to switching wildly
between breaking news and tv yogis
preaching hellfire and damnation.
the never ending banging beating,
remodelling next door has started too.

a wannabe mahinder singh
has shattered another windowpane,
you cannot escape the honking of cars,
and buses and trucks and taxis,
the hawkers who want to be heard
over 'do saada dosa ek chai ek filter coffee'
shouts from the neighbourhood udipi restaurant,
you can even hear the trains
come and go two streets away,

/the rest on Caferati...
/ <http://www.ryze.com/posttopic.php?topicid=894993&confid=1199>
--------
/It sounds like a chant, the urban mantra we live to...

/

Passage (Arka Mukhopadhyay)

You settle in your window-seat,
Dior-coated, burgundy-streaked.

And if I am not wrong, the tag
Says 'Hidesign' on your bag.

The other details also say
'Here is a woman of today.'

Perhaps a fraction too loudly,
With determined effort, proudly.

And yet as the aeroplane slips
Down the tarmac, a finger grips

The locket with its pendant saint,
Your knuckles whitely intent.

--- (the rest on Caferati) ---


Would a woman wear Hidesign with Dior? Why not. Not everyone is dressed in head-to-toe designer. But perhaps that's too real - when you are making a point about what kind of woman she is.
Aside from that (and whether she would wear a pendant saint, which is again an odd choice, of jewellery), the poem's intent is pretty clear, and strongly worded.

Commitment phobic (Sandhya Menon-Koottunkal)

We'll keep deluding ourselves
With birthday and anniversary dinners
Collecting crystal, making love,
Buying pleasure in music and vacations.

And we'll laugh at each others' jokes
Sometimes only because we don't want
Minute-broken hearts or complaints of how
Someone else always "laughs at my jokes".

We'll have children, maybe,
If you're not too old and I, not too fat
And we'll give up smoking and frivilous shopping
So that they can have that
Pony
Holiday
Trip to the moon.

.. (the rest on Caferati on Ryze )
<http://www.ryze.com/posttopic.php?topicid=899527&confid=1199>

Multiple opinions that the title doesn't do justice to what follows, but
I rather prefer it this way. The future of an uneasy union in all its
moments, forcing itself upon a present still undecided. I say undecided
only because the picture of domesticity is still so clear, it obviously
pleases some corner of the mind that dwells on its images, and prefers
not to paint any vision of the alternative at all. It might, after all,
be these images that set out to become real, for they have a plan, they
can see a future, whereas the alternative has no clothes to present
itself in; the alternative is still nothing in itself but a No to the
other.

Back from OZ

No posts for over a month, I was touristing in Australia.

Back and finding a deluge of posts to read...

The Pencil (Transcreation, Vijay Nair)

Confined inside its box,
to an impish sharpener,
the pencil extolled its virtue.
“I am like Saddam. The one,
who faced the noose with a roar.”
Soon arrived Maalu,
the owner of the box.
Into the mouth of the sharpener,
she thrust the pencil, and

Click…!!

Allah-o-Akbar!!
A poem in Malayalam by Abhirami
Translation by Vijay © 23rd July, 2007 on Caferati

Made me smile.