Poetry 2017 Featured, Usha Murali,

Curse of Keratoconus

Light bends and dances
The strand of ray prances.
What curse is this?
A light ray, ray no more!
A pillar isn't stable
It sways and wobbles.
What curse is this?
Straight and sturdy, pillars are no more!
Moving goods and the trader
Are bouncing dolls that teeter
What curse is this?
No motion is steady anymore!
But Mom, you are four
One over the other you are more
Showering love and warmth a score.
Your smiles and looks
With its multiplicity, me hooks.
What curse is this?
Nay! It’s a curse no more!
And dad, he is manifold
With more hair than his head could hold.
His stern love oozing from every fold.
His lean frame vanished
A huge stalwart instead is furbished.
What curse is this?
It is not a curse anymore!
She sits near me
Her hair redolent
Her smile resplendent
Her form multiple- transcendent.
My sister- many in one
What curse is this?
It's never a curse, none!
Clouds and skies merge
Multitudes of shades splurge
Moons are what I have
Splashing colours and dancing letters, I brave.
Green of the trees
Flying birds et all
This vision- all boundaries it frees.
A 6/6 vision
Can never make this provision.
What a curse is this?
Keratoconus- a curse it is no more!
Note: Inspired by my son who suffers from keratoconus in his left eye. He was explaining his vision with a highly positive outlook on a balmy evening. He made it appear as if it was amazing to be able to see things as a blur. I know he suffers and yearns for proper vision. I wrote this to portray his problem as well as his spirit.
PS. He is wearing a special lens that gives him better vision now.

Poetry 2017 Featured Salman Sowdagar

Poetree

Bearing no foliage
Let alone fruits
There it stood
From ages
That big old wood
In a corner of the park.

An oak and maple
And the likes do shed
But only for a time
Unlike that big old wood
Which takes all the rain and sun
From ages
And still stands heedless
Of the stroller's want
For shade.
No wonder no eye it draws
Save the lover's
Which seeks in its vastness
Privateness
To bring forth emotions
Raw and romantic
And those that invoke strife.
But had only that lad
Who meets his beloved under the tree
Every eve
Done something special for her
On her anniversaire
She would be more than pleased
And not walk out the park
Stamping her feet in disgust
Leaving alone the lad
In company of the big old wood.
The lad followed suit
But only to return
In the dead of night
With a paper in left hand
And a white chalk in right
To write
On the brown bole
Of the thick tree
The verses he had inked
For his sweetheart
Which talked of love
That filled his heart.
The morning
That followed the night
Saw the lovers reunite
For the lad had inscribed
Poetry on a tree
Which seemed to the girl's eye
Strikingly beautiful.
But had they once looked up
Before leaving the park
To the big old wood
They would see
On the topmost bough
Of the big old wood
In all its glory
A fresh bud.
And had they once looked up
Before leaving the park
To the big old wood
They would know
Indisputably
Poetry revives not only love
But also life.

Poetry 2017 Featured Reshma Ramesh

Small Hands of Sivakashi

They say that even birds that do not fly have wings
And Jasmines open like umbrellas in the rain,
In such a world, in all its fairness tiny hands of Sivakasi
 Shining in silver like jari on Amma’s pattu sari
Rolling, rubbing, dipping aluminum onto paper
 Sulphur filled nostrils, mercury parched scalp
Are building a legacy of blushing cheeks and gun powder
Rotting like a bad fruit in dark windowless factories
The small hands of Sivakasi are busy at work
Tying and untying bijlis of hope,
But these things happen every other day
Somewhere in the corner we know that they exist
And there are people who for money
Scald children with all their consciousness
And yet we drive to the open ground on Diwali
And buy boxes of fire crackers, especially for our
Children so that back home together all of us can
Burn these small hands of Sivakasi until
The sky lights up and the earth below is filled
With ashes and they the small hands of Sivakasi
Are buried with their mouth open.

Poetry 2017 Featured Pragya Joshi

Canopy of Colours

An infinite expanse of swirling colours,
like a surrealist painter’s palette
Starting off as a transparent gray
until the sun infuses it with its vibrancy,
giving the clouds not a silver, but a golden lining
The red and oranges of the morning
dissolve into the bright blue of the noon sky,
and as I squint against the harsh light,
I can see the cotton candy clouds wafting by.
But the picturesque view must go
as purple begins to dominate,
allowing just a rebellious streak of pink to pass through.
The clouds have sunk lower, forming fragmented rows
by the cool winds.
I see a man clicking a photograph
of this harmonisation of hues,
and the mood is just right,
So I pick up my pen and try to capture it with words.

Poetry 2017 Featured Nilanjana Sanyal

Jesus! Help Me Forgive

The first scars of aging…
As the spades dug deep into the earth’s crust…
As the sun shone on our faces,
Suddenly the world seemed smaller…
The plane took off from Indira Gandhi International Airport.
Taking us out of desperation.
A storm was raging,
As the whip dug deep into my skin…
And the camel raced faster.
As the sun shone on our faces,
Suddenly the world seemed smaller…
The plane took off from King Khalid International Airport.
Taking us out of desperation.

Lo! We were in Beijing…
I could see the Tiananmen Square
I could hear the protests; they opened fire
I was too injured to visit the Great Wall…
As the sun shone on our faces,
Suddenly the world seemed smaller…
The plane took off from Beijing Capital International Airport.
Taking us out of desperation.
The winds of change were blowing,
As everything went out of control
As the polizei on horses watched
As the Berlin Wall fell…
As the sun shone on our faces,
Suddenly the world seemed smaller…
The plane took off from Schonefeld
Taking us out of desperation.
Le Marseillaise
And while the heads were rolling,
The music was playing,
As they stormed the Bastille
As the guillotine came down.
As the sun shone on our faces,
Suddenly the world seemed smaller…
The plane took off from Charles de Gaulle
Taking us out of desperation.
I turned around to see how the rich, exotic Sedans were shining,
I had forgotten the poor, enduring Sudans…
As they massacred my village,
I dug my spade deeper into the ground.
As the sun shone on our faces,
Suddenly the world seemed smaller…
The plane took off from Khartoum International Airport.
Taking us out of desperation.

Rwanda was anything but encouraging,
They killed my brother using a machete.
I cannot forget the horrors of the day.
As the sun shone on our faces,
Suddenly the world seemed smaller…
The plane took off from Kigali.
Taking us out of desperation.
The times-they-are-a-changin’
But I will never get to meet John F. Kennedy…
I will never be able to see the Statue of Liberty
The plane will never touch down…
The spades have gone deep into the ground…
I can hear my mother crying,
And my body gets reduced to ashes.
As the sun shines on my face,
Suddenly the world seems smaller…
The plane has taken off from Indira Gandhi International Airport.
Taking me finally out of desperation

Poetry 2017 Featured Neelam Saxena Chandra

WITHERING

I gazed vacuously for long
At the pale yellow stems of the rose shrub
That was but sand now…
Every passing moment,
A bit of its trace shall vanish,
Till its form is scrapped off completely…
I don’t suppose it died all of a sudden,
It hadn’t flowered at all that year,
And the season before that,
It had merely bloomed…
When I had seen it last frosty winter,
I suppose it had made up its mind
That it no longer wished to stay back...
Death never comes
All of a sudden,
A bit of the self perishes
Little by little
Before the ultimate demise!

Poetry 2017 Featured K V Raghupathi

A Visit to Nagapattinam Harbour Ten Years after Tsunami

He finally took us inside the harbour
though tiny has its own copious history
I read in my school days in history books
-the gateway to the South.
Standing on the bay the man in faded sky blue clothes thus explained:
How tsunami battered it in the early hours
when the town was in the lap of sleep.
The scars on the walls wide as silver dollars
some as big as lids of the cauldrons.
I was close enough to see and feel the folds and spills.
The tug boat weighing 400 tons
was lifted as high as Palmyra tree close by
by tidal waves sixty feet high, thrown upside down.
My bones quivered and quaked
O God, not again!
All sound had died down now
I was clear enough to see in imagination
the wounds and the scars left by the ferocity.
Inside the backwaters, fractured canals
water lapping in foam and tugging
surging into the town as far three kilometres.
Dead floated, sucked in water.
How do I identify trauma in water?
That is true and complete enough to contain it.
How do I reconcile a trauma that is old,
that is already here waiting for us,
like Armada of death?

Poetry 2017 Featured Khurram Nizami

Time Is Mirror

The time will come
When time will be the history.
At that time, time will ponder
On the intent and implementing gesture.
The time will ask then,
Why was I wasted?
The time may lament  
Blissfully, the task could have been done.
The time moves on
As hands will stretch and will also embrace.
And the pendulum moves
Cause, it has to move.
And in between that movement
Efforts are made.
Ideas are floated, executed
Successfully, or unsuccessfully.
The time records all
Calmly and smoothly.
And take my words
Time is everyone’s mirror.

Poetry 2017 Featured Mani Mahesh Garg

Parables

There are limitations
Around the pride walking down
On the infinite vacuum paths
Yours and ours
In the ruins and skeletons, we
Were raised
On deception and
Death, Too morbid
Too casual, yet the horrid
Faces
Live under our skins
And we thought
Only earth is failing us
We hear just
The parables and symbols
Qualms and chords,
In inner and outer
Ailments and desires.
We will
Hang ourselves
Infinite times
In the visions of time
Our hands, its slaves
Our senses, its adventure.
How can we end
What has never been started
In the armour of blasphemy.
Time shall continue
Towards the cave
Parts of us somehow made at
The big bang
Whose vacuums are no longer stable,
Apparently
They are scared by our thoughts
Time rise and fall
In the oceans and clocks,
We believe We
Build and rule its trajectories and hands.
We proudly fill its voids with
Voices
Faces
Perfumes
Pleasures
Tastes.
Yet, it sits quietly
At our fireside
To stay warm and live
A long life
In our thoughts
We are running away
But from whom
The one in whose eyes
We see the mirror?
Well it is biased,
As much as
Our interpretation of what
We see.
The answers lie
Not in long days
And even longer nights. But
In the evenings, vulnerable
Which must loose either light or dark
The dualities in which we spend
Our time…