Don’t become the sand
Don’t become the sand
Where we end,
Become the water
Become the water, where we come from
Tag: Poetry
Soso Tham refused to believe that a people with no evidence of a written history was without foundation or worth. He set out to compile in verse shared memories of the ancient past—ki sngi barim—presenting his people with their own mythology depicting a social and moral universe still relevant to the present day. For him the past is not a dark place but a source of Light, of Enlightenment. It may lie buried but it is not dead, and when discovered will provide the reason for its continued survival. Ki Sngi Barim U Hynñiew Trep is the lyrical result of dedicated devotion. It is an account of how Seven Clans—U Hynñiew Trep—came down to live on this earth.
Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right, at least people wrote poems for you! RAIOT’s tribute to the philosopher of revolution and history on his 200th birth Anniversary
When she took an afternoon nap,
she was tigerish: “You sons of a vagina!” she
would snarl, “you won’t even let me rest for a moment,
sons of a fiend! Come here sons of a beast! If I
get you I’ll lame you! I’ll maim you! …Sons
of a louse! You feed on the flesh that breeds you!
Make a noise again when I sleep and I’ll thrash you
till you howl like a dog! You irresponsible nitwits!
how will I play the numbers If I don’t get a good dream?
How will I feed you, sons of a lowbred?
Around 00:05 on February 19 2018, Indian armed forces shot dead Syed Habibullah after he allegedly “tried to enter the high security Air Force Station” in Central Kashmir’s Budgam district. The police spokesman said that the man, in his fifties, “appeared to be mentally challenged”—he was not wearing any footwear, had no winter clothing, and did not carry any identity card. Those who knew him told media-persons that “he used to roam from once place to another, not because he was mentally challenged but because he was distressed with extreme penury.” He was laid to rest in his native village of Soibug amidst pro-freedom slogans and clashes with the government forces.
The name Habibullah translates as ‘the beloved of God.’
Laugh – you are being watched,
Laugh, but not at yourself because its bitterness
Would be noticed and you would not survive it
Laugh in a way that your happiness does not show
As it would be suspected that you do not participate in the remorse
And you would not survive it
O Daddyji, o daddyji, they don’t just laff these aurat-log,
they laugh at us, they do, they do
Its worse, its worse, its so much worse
They slurp their beer, they do, they do
Worried about his prolonged boozing,
His son-in-law once took him to a specialist.
Disgusted to find his parts normal and realizing
He has lost a patient, the specialist inscribed
In his report: Has been drinking for 52 years.
Naturally, I threw away all the pills he gave
Said the man who only smiles but never laughs.
A poet interviews his publisher and the publisher retorts right back in this irreverent conversation between Abhimanyu Kumar (whose debut collection of poems Milan & the Sea came out in October 2017) and Dibyajyoti Sarma, publisher of Red River (formerly i write imprint)
Sometimes, through no fault of its own, a neighbourhood picks up a bad reputation. If you happen to visit it on a singularly uneventful day, you will find it roofed with a blue sky, and dark-green pines and bamboos stooping to kiss its dusty road. And although it is true that love was made in all its wintry houses and its dead have been buried in its unruffled graveyard, you would never guess how it earned such a vague hatred from outsiders.
One of the greatest Tamil poets, C. Subramania Bharathi’s wrote a poem welcoming Russian Revolution – in a translation by V. Geetha
how do i explain to her why a cat
wants to run over the stairs up and down?
or want to go out in the cold and heat
and sit for ages in some folorn corner
of an abandoned room of some apartment?
cats do what they do. i also remember
someone who once asked what it was
that one could learn from a cat?
i wanted to say everything but
i did not think she would get it
Some deaths are like rituals
No one even remembers the dates.
Some deaths are remembered forever
To haunt you and even in your sleep.
I feared and angered
In my younger years,
When men ask me at the bus stop,
“Chinky kitna?”
Until the numbers
Tired me.
And my own violence
Violated my sisters on the streets.
So now i respond –
“Sau lakh” (or more).
My mother once told me a story
Of when she was a little girl,
How the entire village huddled up inside a church,
When the bombs dropped.
And the surprise checking they endured
My grandmother would pick her up
And carry her on her back
Praying they would not rape mothers and children.
Even after hearing news of thirty or sixty or three hundred children dying
I don’t do much of anything at all, just close my eyes for a little while
“Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission,
Having never set eyes on this land he was called to partition
Between two peoples fanatically at odds,
With their different diets and incompatible gods.”
“His birthday is everybody’s birthday
Let’s say born to light
The day of burning the lamp of hope
Let’s say born to light”
I met Eunice first in very best way – in poems, just as she recommended. Women in Dutch Painting was the first book of poetry I remember reading, as opposed to poems in anthologies or single poems encountered and half-remembered.
The college authorities decided one day that they needed to ask women students not to wear skirts above the knee, and to ban students from smoking on the college grounds. The Vice Principal came to our classroom to make this announcement: its effect was marred considerably by the sight of Eunice at the back of the room, pointedly lighting up a cigarette with a trademark look of ironic amusement on her face.
Where do I belong?
In this city that is too old
In those hills that are too cold
Or America
But I am no burly Polish dissident
Nor of cultivated Bengali intellect
Or a Punjabi with a partitioned wallet
Only a rough diamond with festers and sores
Shall I then go to Surat?
General your tank is a powerful vehicle.
It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men.
But it has one defect:
It needs a driver.
She said, “She loves dogs”
What she meant was she doesn’t eat dog meat.
I said, “Me too, I love beef Biryani”
She asked if she is safe in my town
I told her it is her people who are guarding the town.
You asked me
the nationality of my vagina
You fear
In its chasm lies
The key to the community’s downfall
Let us lynch, rape, kill them in peace;
build a temple of purebred-filth
on razed mosques and dargahs,
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.
Nothing has changed.
It’s just that there are more people,
and beside the old offences new ones have sprung –
real, make-believe, short-lived, and non-existent.
But the howl with which the body answers to them,
was, is and ever will be a cry of innocence
according to the age-old scale and pitch.
I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
“O Mummyji, o mummyji, they don’t fight fair
These Cashmirie–
Their boys, their girls, their women too
They throw their stones, they do, they do,
And us poor boys (what? yes, “my poor boys”)
Have only guns and armour
What, prithee, are they to do? to do?”
If it wasn’t for the Indian government
I swear I won’t even remember my father’s name
They’re obsessed and keep asking for it,
For every important document of my life.
I am a Hindu and in these murderous Hindu times
I think they won’t kill me
But what would I do if spared
Childhood dreams
in the darkness
of countless lead-pellets
lodged like tumours
in fresh corneas
to mend
the ruptures of history
So,
To my country and my people, I don’t pledge my devotion,
Because
To your country and your people, I am but a woman,
To you my dear Khasis and Indians, I owe no patriotism,
Because,
To all of you, I am forever unwritten,
Forever an apparition, an absence.
Do not name the martyrs,
and hurl them into jungles of details.
Unearth their names from
grounds of past and memories.
Let them be streets without names
in those future cities after revolution.
Minor Inconveniences
Lalnunsanga Ralte’s old poem about the tragedy/farce of Demonetisation
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