Poetry 2019 Featured Poet, Imran Yousuf

Home (A Ghazal)

Come and listen to the ode, yelling about the ruination of my city,

I can't creep an inch outside my skin, they have shackled the salvation of my city

The fountain of my heart has shrivelled, and birds of the cage have lost feathers,

The spring no more utter a melody, but waits for the consolation of my city

Songs of that Cuckoo, singing on the branches of Chinar, do you remember?

Or you are too crushed the mirror of memories with the extinction of my city!

The songbirds and nightingales seated on the branches have lost the tongue,

They no more sing the songs of love and glory but hums about the alienation of my city

Moon now rises under the shades of darkness and the sun faints at noon, 

The lamp which once lightened the ruins, waits for the resurrection of my city

No more home, no more homeland but pure silence which seldom sings, 

Fewer praise poems, pure emptiness and lost perception of my city 

My soul has become a roving stranger, roaming in search of home.

Walk through the deserted meadows and witness the desolation of my city.

Poetry 2019 Featured Poet, Mrinalini Harchandrai

Damnation

The villagers sat chest-deep

in swirling water

passing bread as they held protest

banners, staying resolute

like river rocks

their livelihoods gambled

for drops at the ballot

their lives exchanged

for an ocean of people

they’ve never met.

The nation downstream

would turn on their taps

not knowing whose blood

would be washing their vessels

whose tears would be the dew

on their days

whose roots have been wrenched

to moisten their buds.

Personal histories

get submerged and eroded

in the levee of politics

displacing the humanity

in cost exchange spillways

hydro power surges

with tension and sparks

backroom dictatorships

zapping and trading rights

redrafting survival laws

at the crimson sluice gates

of development.

Poetry 2019 Featured Poet, Swatilekha Roy

An Ode to Shower

Rivulets from icebergs, mud gorges from wrong touches

Ripples of despair in the cracks and crevices 
of brown trenches - the armpits.

Someone must have switched the geyser off again,

But you don’t mind the numbness- it has been around for a while.

with every drop of cold sweat and feet on an exile

No one to resent your space,

Or point at this mess

Or even scoff at the dress

Because there isn’t one on.

Music drowning out the admonishing

of frantic thoughts-

The ‘oh why-s’ and ‘why not-s’

and every other regret under the peach tiled roof;

Warmer canyons of narrow doubts and shadow creeks

Trailing down your unflushed cheeks,

The snaking line of smoke,

Lisps and traces, warm and formless,

Drifting like you, out through the window

Settling on cool pipes

Like a cosy winter memory

Young and forgotten, a summary.

Poetry 2019 Featured Poet, Sonal Singh

A Languid morning

As the day steals o’er the languid morning

I wrap the duvet of my dreams,

Sit by the window and

indulge.

The haze of the caliginous night lifts

Revealing a slumbering dawn

That yawns at the

Aubade.

The dew melds into the rain dripping 

From the eaves like a sparge

As if the morning

Ablates.

In the quietude of the supine morrow

I stretch to rouse my somnolent

Senses, coming awake

Languorously.

The misty veil lifts revealing sunshine

Incandescent like spun gold

Spilling its lambency

Ubiquitously.