PoemsIndia NaPoWriMo2024: Featured Poems (2/n)
Here is the second set of featured poems from PoemsINdiaNaPoWriMo2024. Enjoy reading!
My mother and her plants by Ritu Jain
My mother caresses the head of her plants after she’s taken out on them, her insatiable wrath. The onions, potatoes and tomatoes on our soil gallantly survive quotidian air quakes my mother blows over them. In doing so she dons satisfaction of keeping her promise to self of not hurting anyone in the family with her temper. And our benevolent veggies seem to never mind her helpless ignorance. The fatigue from the chores she undertakes is the first layer of water her friends to rant intake. Household tit bits have become addon essentials for the life of our farm. Surprisingly, they remain true to their respective natures, and the taste of their produce doesn’t change an ounce. Possibly they’ve generously adopted a mother’s style of farming. Elated as she must be by her ecological service and gratified with her therapists, our mother, in the evening tilted her palms full of fertile soil into a few more pots of her old friends’ family.
Men are fundamentally bad roommates by Saheen Rahman
their wet towels never leave the bathroom ashes in the plant, used tissues on the table their shoes and their gasps occupy a brand-new place in the living room every day. Men are really just bad roommates, no? but on ugly days at work, these Men that i share a house with, makes me a bountiful meal - well-cooked rice and dal, with extra ghee yes they do lean on clean walls with oiled hair and, and sometimes snore too loud at other times, manages to effortlessly get on my last nerve but a house is only a home with them around their roaring burps and noisy snores fill up the quiet and I’ve never liked the loud as much. i think these bad roommates are growing on me they are not as economical or responsible as you’d like them to be they spill the milk on the stove often and their socks cry to be washed almost every day. but when i crib for hours too long, they take me out to the supermarket for grocery shopping we come back and smoke a cigarette and life never feels as fulfilled as it does right in the moment. these bad roommates never ask for too much, just a little consideration of their chaotic or rather untidy lifestyle i think i am in love with them. is Love a bad roommate?
The Ma(n)soleum by Ananya Aneja
and when god tested the pigment of his paints, to turn the water in your arteries into the sanguine elixir Crashing his teeth on the threads of your veins, nervously tamping the bristles of his paintbrush on vacuous paper. all shades of red imprinted on his palms in sporadic amorphous silhouettes, But at last when all this blood was injected under your skin, it was mid may summer with a few bloated sweat drops dripping down his nape and he was sloppily sipping rooh afza, or maybe your blood, the shades were precisely indistinguishable to say so. and when god drafted the final sketch of your lungs, he traced the outlines of a few mausoleums, keeping the dome roofs intact, burying soluble angels in their cocoons. Installing pink satin scaffoldings all around them as if death could bite the nails of life and dress up as a barbaric barbie incandescently bailing her ancestors who would have embraced death sentence as a fairly invisible mirage of a long lost relative visiting them nonchalantly. And when god finally laid the architecture of your lungs, the breasts under his eyes were sagging and his hands were stinged like a toddler still learning to hold a pen, He smoked two packets of cigarettes and everything in his workshop smelled like it had bathed in nicotine. and when god was sketching your eyes, a ship sailed beneath his balcony ferrying refugees back to their homelands with their dowries and luggages packed neatly. young men wrote poems on paper soaps, washing their hands with ink and calling them cremating grounds of unsung verses of unrequited love. The X ray reports of our nation diagnosed rickets and the solar system was a cemetery of rockets - both fatal enough to fall apart like the eyelashes of my mother who doesn't know any other way to make a wish. That year god too was finally reckoning his alopecia as a result of sleeplessness and malnutrition. God is a corporate slave in his abode, and his parasitic children are cramming his desk with labour rights unaware how he too would paint a dead man like a seven figure commision paid to an artist for sending a few meaningless e-mails. But when god was drawing your eyes, his precision was dismissed by a seizure, his hands swollen and his bathroom floor daubed with tears. He would have starved for fifteen days only to carve your eyes.
Finding Design in Loneliness by Anushri
I think it's beautiful, How loneliness designs itself, Into this funny thing, Of noticing pieces, Pieces in which people who left your heart lonely Exist. Quite meticulously, gracefully. Look at the simplicity, You wake up in the morning, It's not been long, So the flowers they gave are still drying up at the corner of your table. You look around, You see a sticky note they left months ago. You smile yet pity yourself. You are hurriedly running to work, You find your lock, In the chaos, they still manage to exist in the keychain. You are walking by a bench near your house, You see them sitting there and smiling. You are too busy to even think, Yet they exist in a song that comes up while your playlist is on shuffle, Or on the recents while forwarding a message, On WhatsApp and Instagram. You forget you are wearing them in a ring, They exist in that. You notice only when it gets stuck in your clothes. Your clumsy self, spilled a little evening tea, And you hear their laugh. It's almost the end of the day, You don't feel like eating, Yet they exist in some meals you shared. You look at the moon, It's crescent and glowing, You smirk thinking of stories they told you about the moon, You reach home back, You find them on your wall, In a hazy photograph, You took of them, At a random evening. They might have left, For good or bad, Yet they exist. They exist, in these bits and pieces, That you were too busy to notice earlier, And constructs a beautiful building, You call it loneliness. I think it's beautiful, How loneliness designs itself.