Swar Thounaojam 'A sentry converses'

So it appears that I haven't posted a poem in some days. This must be remedied.

I was on twitter when Swar tweeted about the Indian army molesting women in newly-under-AFSPA Arunachal Pradesh, when I remembered her poem from a Guardian poetry workshop some years ago.

Also, that workshop happened to be about writing letters and my poetry prompt last month at The Sideways Door was about letters unsent on never received. 

Finally, that workshop was by Kate Clanchy, whose book Meeting the English sounded interesting (but I found I couldn't finish it. I am thinking of giving up my library membership altogether, since I never seem to begin or finish the books I borrow.)

Enough of coincidences; they have nothing to do with the poem, which I've always found powerful. 


           A sentry converses 

           by Swar Thounaojam

Ibungo, how is your urn?
Does it still hold you?
First they put a garage over you
Then a plot of chives and shallots
Now it is a tea stall
and underneath the bench, on which I sweat sipping my tea,
is you - 14 months old and gone for 12 years.

Your mother cried she gave you the greater love.
So good you and your brother
were such unthinking children
and that you died.
Loud, unlike love is such drivel to grow up with.

You were too young to know you had a big head.
So let me tell you - you had a gigantic head
and never cried.
First, people said you were a good-natured child.
Then you became too odd - a never-crying child.
You were shown to doctors, who showed
you were wrong somewhere.
They were about to fix you properly
When you just left.

I think of you often,
wishing you were my real brother:
I could have claimed your death as my valid sorrow
and rig people to explain
my unsound quiet with it.

Now I will beat my heels,
right where the spade struck first to bury you.
There, can you hear it?

Ibungo, you never grew up to know me.
But remember this is your Che, your big sister,
Guarding your life.

Scroll Poetry Column 2: Heard melodies

I have been wrestling with the formatting of a poem and if I can't figure it out, I will scan it and put up an image.

In the meantime, what I thought was a fortnightly column for Scroll has apparently been changed into a weekly. The second column is now up here.

In it, I find myself talking once more about a teacher of mine, and Eliot and Leonard Cohen. Oh and AK Ramanujan. 

Rukawat ke kiye khed hai

It is raining in Hyderabad. These are unseasonal rains, and in certain districts, accompanied by hailstorms and the consequent destruction of standing crops. For lots of people this is not good news.

But here, where it kindly rains mostly late in the evening, or at night and in at dawn, where I don't have to deal with sewage-y roads and the jerul's flowered branch is weighed down by rain so ALL the flowers are right outside my window, i can't bring myself to complain.

In fact, I can't even bring myself to be online, let alone looking for poems or post them.

So, as long as the weather is not summer when it should be, I won't be posting.

Later!

Afzal Ahmed Syed 'A Dog's Death'

Yesterday, I didn't post a poem because I was out all day and then sprained my neck (or something) and then it sort of rained and there was no question of being online.

This morning, I am sifting through things I do not want to and with a sense of relief, I found someone on twitter had linked to this poem by Afzal Ahmed Syed. That in turn made me pull out his collection Rococo and Other Worlds, from which this poem below:

 Rococo and Other Worlds

 Rococo and Other Worlds

 Rococo and Other Worlds

A Dog’s Death

by Afzal Ahmed Syed translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi

Air Vice-Marshal Manocher Nadirshaw
taking his dinner
during a civilian flight
chokes on a bone
and dies

Throw another dog
before just such a bone

New column in Scroll

Every other Wednesday, I will write a column in Scroll on my poetic influences. Or something - basically, I will write about whatever happens to catch my fancy that also has to do with poetry, however tangentially.

Here's the first one. It's on Rilke (whose poems you must read but whose photo you must avoid looking at if you possibly can).

(I really should aggregate these column in full on the blog, no? One day they'll disappear on the site and I won't be able to see what I wrote or where. Well, I will, but not online, and someone stop me from allowing words out of my mouth I can't seem to stop.)

Alfonso Gatto 'A Day Where the Hour'

On a day when the news is full of cops killing people who were unarmed, I don't know what to post. I daren't look online. The new books of poetry mostly have their spines intact. Instead, I look in another shelf that contains precious books that are out of print and will never be found outside of chance encounters on pavements with second-hand books.

I said 'encounters' when I was trying to avoid the word. 

From an ancient copy of Italian Writing Today, here's Alfonso Gatto. I have the page propped open with a CD cover, trying not to stress the spine.

 A Day Where the Hour

by Alphonso Gatto, translated by Gavin Ewart

A day where the hour of death is
may not be the place, but the bier
goes down everywhere towards it doors
of darkness, the earth does not learn

the name which its living chose for it.
In the invisible boundaries that you touch,
from the sky to the mountains to the trees where you arrive
dying to look at it again with your eyes,

the earth is the distance and your journey.
But, once there, is earth all near to itself,
the perpetual eavesdropping of a mirage 
that fixes on every eyelash its thorn.

Sawsan al-Areeque 'More Than Necessary'

One of my friends at the IWP was a writer and filmmaker from Yemen. It was the first time ever that the IWP was hosting a writer from that country. Now, things are a mess in Yemen and I have spent the last week worrying about Sawsan. 

This is one of her poems. I am remembering her reading this poem aloud in Arabic; a little gesture emphasising a word or a line. I hope she is okay.

 

 

 More Than Necessary

by Sawsan al-Areeque

translated by Sawsan al-Areeque & Willa C. Richards

 

When I allow myself

to be myself

I am surprised

that the rose on the balcony

smiles

more than necessary

and nighttime in the city’s face

lingers

more than necessary

and the moon on my dining table

is too near.

 

Then I decide to allow myself

to be half myself

until I do not feel these things

more than is necessary.

The Sideways Door April Prompt

April has a reputation, probably deserved, for being the cruellest month. And since it's being cruel to me, I don't see why I shouldn't pass that particular parcel of delights on to people reading The Sideways Door.

Here is this month's prompt.

Kaloji Narayana Rao 'We should remember'

Today's poem comes at the request of my son, who has heard of the poet Kaloji Narayana Rao in his Telugu class. I looked for translations but of course was hard put to it to find [m]any.

This poem, 'We should remember', appears in Velcheru Narayana Rao's book of modern Telugu poems in translation, titled Hibiscus on the Lake.

I've had to take screenshots of the pages from Google Books, so here they are.

We should remember

by Kaloji, translated by Velcheru Narayana Rao

 

Delay in April's Sideways Door

This month's prompt at The Sideways Door will be delayed by a couple of days.

There's usually a lot of formatting to be done because it's poetry, and that takes time. There are people on leave and the column will go up, therefore, on Monday.

(That's tomorrow).