Borewell (Poem)

Lying in wait in broad daylight
Gaps in the earth
Like meaningless words
Of a news hound
Tapping soundless tears
Will the funeral be delayed?

Walking the same way as yesterday,
but somehow foosteps sense tragedy
And the sky is shrunk to a moon
A circle of light far above
No homework for me
Today or any other day.

Caferati link..

Sandeep, 9 years old, died trapped in an abandoned borewell for 57 hrs, RIP.
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/apr262007/update028442007427.asp

Listen (Rohinton Daruwala)

Listen*


Listen
tea, rhymes with gold,
or better still,
sunlight breaking through
the trees,

continued..

So lovely until the last para - a bit of a cliché.
Aparna

Medusa (Anindita Sengupta)

Did you look in the mirror one day and
find that you had grown used to it? The hair -
gleaming, little coils, each one tensile
as rope; the tongue quick and sharp as sunlight;
eyes vast in that thin face, deeper than earth.
continued..

I liked everything except the line "the girl walking calmly to meet the sea" and the word "rainsoaked".
Love the last 2 stanzas.
Aparna -milika

Bad Writing (Writing Exercise)

Praise the all-cognizant celestial divinity that I am not a defective correspondent. I apperceive that I am not abhorrent in my contributions, considering the actuality that my spelling is predominantly gratifying, my cognition of the principles of linguistic structure is substantial, and my excessive adoption of multi-syllabic idiom is congenital.

I formulate entire communications, merely to emblazon my acquaintance with an acclaimed scribe of current vogue whose actual works I am entirely free of comprehension (as I extolled in my essay on Kundera's alleged remarks on the lastability of prejudiced identities).

I often give impulse to fatuous verse..(can you attend the thunderous applause I hear in my cerebellum as I commit this)

Ode to Thee, my Reader, in Thy solitude
A plea! - Why Thou art not mine
Thine loneliness art thy escape
As thou gracefully spurn thy love
to those who still 'thee, thine, thou'

Thus I stand perfectly equipped by power of education and an eminently accessible thesaurus to effectuate upon the universe my meritorious and laudable efforts, bar the fact that I possess no cogitations to express. I however do not restrain myself on such barren occasions, as being mostly anthropomorphic, I am not wholly against self-titillation.

Caferati Link..

The Island of Lost Ideas (Ramasubramanian G S)

(unfortunately, the original seems to have disappeared off Caferati)

Are you planning to post more chapters? Very engaging writing. Especially the part in the first chapter where he backtracks to ask why they think he is impartial - that he doesn't ask the question right away, but thinks of it as an afterthought. Small fact, but what a huge difference it made - being lifelike, instead of logical made everything that followed it look real as well. We try to order events logically, and it seems stagey, and not natural.

Reading your first chapter, somewhere in the middle, my mind started to go off tangent trying to finish that Chapter as a different kind of story. I don't usually ask this, but would you mind if I tried that and posted it?

Aparna

poem-This Moment Etched (Abha Iyengar)

THIS MOMENT ETCHED

Can I place this moment
In your hand
And ask you to gulp it down
So that it sears your throat
Leaving a furrow
within
Your skin
so smooth and clear

continued..


"Right there
At the base of your throat
Where your pulse quickens
at the sight of me
This moment."

Beautiful, forceful.

The ESL test (Caferati)

You've heard of Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, right? Have you tried The Punctuation Game on the book's site? No? Hie thee thither post-haste. And if you get much less than 100 per cent, reconsider your writing career. Seriously.

~peter

Link..