running on empty –
the road behind me
littered with unreasonable poems
Found two beautiful poems today: Dashi by Robert Okaji and Daughter of the plains by Ryan Stone. Just two beautiful reasons to keep loving and reading and writing poetry. What has inspired you today? What keeps you going even when the words are hard to find?
broken world –
monsoon clouds like Band-aid strips
on an ebbing sky
Alternating between banal work and the feverish dystopia of my newsfeed, it does feel, sometimes, like the world is coming apart in an insane hurry, everywhere. In the middle of war and hate and climate change and the pandemic, if there is a safe place, it seems like it is getting smaller and smaller or fading away in the fog. Meanwhile, there’s poetry, rare but still able to say that, once, there was a time, somewhere, safe enough so a poet could, for a while, put pen to paper.
it says nothing, it says everything
hold it up to the light again,
some days, you’ll see a poem
An abating second wave (really?), an enraged monsoon (climate change?), a monday-friday grind that mocks attempts at writing, a shrinking world of poetry suddenly made beautiful by an unexpected poem that drops into my timeline – how’re things in your world? What have you been writing?
even in a parallel universe –
is there this longing,
this poem?
I’ve been an infrequent visitor to my blog. Sometimes I write and some of it finds its way to Instagram, the blog, however, is languishing… and nothing, it appears, can do away with Covid or create the mindspace for focused blogging, focused writing, focused anything. But, in the middle of pandemic listlessness, absent inspiration, disappeared muse and a time-devouring day job, I’m compiling a book. More on that, when the path stops being so utterly uphill. Hope to read all your posts this week and write more-post more-read more…think I miss this space… more than I realized. Stay safe all…the planet of the variants is not a friendly place.
transplanting rice
she complains
about her heartless lover
to a scarecrow
without
a head
sweat trickling down her back
she watches him
in the rice field
a shadow lands,
then an egret
another shadow, another egret
first summer rain
the smell of want
the smell of soil
ankle-deep in water
she giggles —
covering his face
In August 2017, I had six poems published on The Cherita. I couldn’t share the poems immediately because of the rules of the journal and then the display format. Later, ‘The Cherita’ released several anthologies, collecting all the poems published by them. I recently managed to get myself the kindle version of one of the books titled ‘Where the river bends‘ and can finally, have all my poems up on my blog. Cherita is a form, as you might know, created by Ai Li who is the editor of the online journal and the curator of the anthologies. (If you’ve already seen a few of them on my Instagram page, well, this is the backstory)
(1)
the horizon thickens
the sea separates
from the curdled sky
we rise like wet birds
from the water
into emptiness, into nothing
(This Cherita also appears in my book ‘Water to Water‘)
(2)
origami bird
I fold and refold
our love
hoping
one day
it will fly
(3)
the after-rain
a moon trembles
in every puddle
sleep leaves the window
and slips into
my empty bed
(4)
a door slammed
a dog barked softly
once, twice
she woke up
when she heard the wind
tiptoe into the garden
(5)
afternoon quiet
the cat sleeps
in sunshine squares
the light and I
argue about shadows
and god
(6)
the sound of temple bells
she closes her eyes
for a moment
when did she get
too old
to pray for love
part moon-part cloud
all the things
I should have forgotten
the more you arrive at the end,
the more you remain
at the beginning –
see the koel, with monk-like eyes,
watching the black crow’s nest
Haven't written a lot of micropoetry since November 2017, when I hosted Micropoetry Month (You can also find the link in the sidebar). Time to give it another shot, maybe?
(1)
nothing
black wing on tangerine sky
and…still…nothing
(2)
summer solstice
how short this night
how long her empty sigh
(3)
one moon stirred pond
one splash of insomniac frog
what are the odds
(4)
rain falls on glass
on tile
on leaves-
so many ways
the sky calls out your name
(5)
wordless question
slanting shadows
kneel on the bamboo mats
(6)
between her and the night
a paper lantern
with one eye
(7)
even the moth
that burns in the flame
first sees the light
(8)
in the distance
autumn
I tremble with the leaves
(9)
stirring the afternoon
lone crow
with a broken wing
like Scheherazade
fighting
to stay alive
love invents
a new reason
every night
