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 Sudhanshu Chopra

Losing Coordinates

We rounded the bedroom corners to
a bright finish. In the depths, I hung

my old shirt, my suede jacket, your scarf
wrapped around its faded shoulders.

Everything seemed to disappear in the
symmetry of the curves, lost in time as

if all the way back to our first date night.
We emptied our heads in the sink before

turning off the lights, and wheeled our
suitcases to the taxi. On arrival, I watched

you unpack, and breathe in the emptiness
of the boxes. Arched, you looked like the

bridge we had crossed over. I saw your little
green hairclip lying precariously where the

piers joined. It had tagged along, hiding in
the black waves. Now a freight ship was coming

through, you set to give passage. I held my
hand very close to the eye, and climbed your

rising back slow-mo on giant fingers. Below,
the colourless sea beat for a familiar splash.

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 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 Deepali Singhvi

Existence

Magnifying the snowflakes,
everything awakes,
those spectacular snowflakes,
being
what the heavenly makes,
this is what it takes,
being nothing when not magnified,
and being everything when magnified,
where it has never died,
the beauty exists,
sometimes it leaves,
but still it exists -
for it is what that makes us
feel,
the world can be spectacular,
if there is no fear,
and nobody is somebody's dear!

Poetry 2017 Featured Chandrama Deshmukh

Surrender


We speak like rattling rain
And fumble through inhibitions
Before we reach each other.
I dip each word, in the inky darkness of my mind and hang it over the moon.
And he,
He glorifies the crescent
Day after day after day.
We aren't meant for each other
We don't intend to be.
Rather
We exchange random pieces of mind
The puzzle latches perfectly.
And then we dance
In our heads, together
Surrender to the whirling
Of this dervish, the universe
He knows, and I know
This is what there is
He knows and I know
This is all that there will ever be.

Someday,
we shall meet over the moon
And read to each other
Every poem of the past

Someday,
When the moon looks brighter
Know, that we took our poems back.

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…