PoemsIndia NaPoWriMo2024: Featured Poems (1/n)
We'll share the best of our PoemsIndiaNaPoWriMo24 reads on Substack. This is just the start of many more to come. Enjoy the read!
Inside nothingness is a river by Sehar
After Zaina Alsous Inside the faucet of nothingness is a river. Inside the river, some loose fragments of tree Inside the tree, fish skulls, salt buried in the chest of the earth, unnamed forgotten lovers. Inside the lovers, a sea of sorrow. Inside the sea, young men drowning in the bloom of youth looking for bread and tasting citrus. Inside the men, a woman’s broken anatomy. Inside the woman, a lifelong of yearning, hanging cliffs, grief stuck in the gaps of their teeth. Inside the yearning, a botanist’s plantation theory. Inside the theory, a recipe of remembering. The thing is I never wished to go knocking door to door Looking for the bones of the dead. I never really wished to loose my softness. I just kept staring at the wall for too long. I was spilled through grief. I kneeled to kiss my sorrow and steadily sank it.
404 Page Not Found by Ishita Desai
Big words and long rhymes, books in piles with pretty spines, blurring borders between places and times, where I grew up, dragons roared, rings had lords, carpets flew, and wizards with long beards ruled. Rivers were made of chocolate and houses of cake, friends came in all shapes - pig, spider and snake. Doors opened to jungles and stairs magically moved, rabbit holes led to tea parties and topsy-turvy rooms. I grew up in worlds of talking beasts and magic beans, secret gardens and giving trees. Where giants were kind, tin men had hearts, and mischievous cats wore red-and-white hats. Now, stories are interrupted by beeps and chimes, phone screens punctuate metrical rhymes, books in piles lie with dusty spines.
I lost my town of old by Sumiya Mustafa
I know I lost my town of old seeing the seaside fortified with a spate of commerce, I know I lost my town of old hearing the honks and whirring of motorcades at 11 p.m., I know I lost my town of old when it's early bed-time behavior is outmoded, I know I lost my town of old when the bazaar roads resemble the face of a generic city suburb, I know I lost my town of old when the franchises overtake the businesses of old bakeries, I know I lost my town of old when the thuds of coconuts are superseded by the noises of concrete mixers, I find my town of old in fragments that the new spared while sweeping away with its haughty long cloak. The fragments - I find my town of old in the charred walls of dingy bakeries' that bake jarring cream cakes, I find my town of old in the chimneys of palm sap tappers' huts whose women perform sorcery like magical sweetmeats, I find my town of old in the smell of the frankincense that smog the altar of the grocery store in my neighborhood at 7 p.m., I find my town of old in the dullness of a sunny afternoon when cuckoos sing, crows craw, and the many other birds go chirpy, I find my town of old in the plastic tub of fried food that the seller women hawks through my side alley, I find my town of old in the tik-tak of the bearded old man walking towards the neighborhood Masjid, I find my town of old in the banter of our fishmonger and my grandmother's dear sidekick every morning, I find my town of old in the fried fritters that are bouquetted in an old newspaper, I find my town of old in the stationery shop where you get new trinkets and old notes as loose changes, Doesn't the human heart know time and space aren't refrigerable?! Nostalgia is a bait sentiment, an all-powerful one, To which we willingly fall, That which the enterprising minds know to bejewel, They create old textures in new spaces, Attempting to take us 'back in time', They create sensorium, mnemonics in the name of food, adorn walls with yesteryear's vogue - chocolate wrappers, divas, empty tins of Dalda. Nostalgia is a cliche, but also an emotion that defeats us, Make us meet with our own frailty. Olden days are on a constant renewal, for a twenty, or a forty, or a sixty - olden days exist for everyone. And from the afternoon congregations of my grandmother and grand aunts did I know, That no one's town of old survives.
Without stories, how can I know my city by Moumita Alam
My Nani in her last days had a hunchback like a sack of air. It was inflating. At night I could hear inside the hunch the hush-hush and jostling of the stories that she used to tell us when we were children enough. I could hear the crumbling of the city falling bit by bit and the stories going inside into memories. The smell of the noon when she had just finished her lunch with maach-bhat and waiting for my Nana to return to the tin house in Senpara, Jalpaiguri is spiralling away in the smoke of the incense sticks. She took the shape of the bow with her knees touching her chin I saw on the bed the last city's ageing beyond youth and the hunch growing larger till the last breath fell into complete silence. The stories of the hunch stopped talking Time had eaten up the warmth of the memories. I wander every night in search of the stories I stumble upon the new lanes I can't recognise my city Without stories how can I know my city? Don't we know our city by the warmth of the stories?
Agra by Antara Vashistha
Mother no longer recounts the adventures of jumping off a moving train with her two sons at Shahganj, to pay the rickshaw puller twenty bucks for teen sawari, destination? ladli katra, nearby attractions? a green and white colored building that sells shoes, the barren field on the other side of the road is often the site for carnivals and fairs, I remember I once threw up outside the bouncy castle, this was my first Ferris wheel, my first well of death, I remember being a little and trying my hand at dime pitch, winning the soap Santoor and singing the song back. The sepia that captures the memory of naanu- a man I have never known standing on the streets shows how they've simply replaced the layer of paint all these years, The shade has stayed the same. I have walked the same bricked road my mother grew up on, the same road I saw my first shooting star. Sikandra stands nearby, proudly exactly how it did in pictures from a memory of a rainy afternoon I do not remember. We have lost the neighbors who used to ask us to bring pethas and dalmoth from the Panchi shop on Yamuna Expressway. it feels incredulous to think I have never gifted my friends a miniature Taj Mahal, somehow its ethereal beauty has always evaded me, Many a day I think back to the samosas and noodles from one variant of the Sattolala shop, I do not think my parents ever grew accustomed to Delhi's kachoris, but no one recites their orders no more. All these years we have driven through, in a hurry, not making a pit-stop along the way in Agra. Naani died the previous year, and now survives in pictures and videos, I hear her mandir is now a storeroom. I wonder, if they gave away the dozen packets of Parle G she always stored in her cupboard. I remember my last night in Agra I stayed awake, looking at the same sky, thinking of the smell of dosas, of their heads filled with white hair, of their wrinkled hands, so steady, their voices so confident and lively, I thought of how they survive for me in the rustle of the old typewriter I do not yet know how to use, the end of an era lost in the fading tint of the keys, sometimes, I type Agra on an empty paper, sometimes, the keys smell like that home.
More to follow in our next installment. See you soon.