Poems Of The Week 004: Begin Your Poem With The Last Line Of The Last Poem You Read
This week has got to be our favourite week. It’s always interesting to see what a poet makes of a thought left by another poet. To end a poem is to begin a new one, and that’s exactly what happened in the last seven days.
We saw poets selecting their favourite poems, and working on making sense of something beautiful left by the poets in the past. While some created completely different ideas out of the last lines of the poems they selected, the others carried forward something that the poet had left behind: a conflict, an emotion, an itch, a purpose or the same home opening the door to a different room.
The prompt of the week, as you may have guessed by now, was:
Begin your poem with the last lines of the last poem you read.
And we want to take a moment to appreciate the effort put in by everyone writing, and the discussions they engaged in with their fellow poets. It was magical to see each of them create beauty out of the borrowed last lines.
End of the first month of writing consecutively every week seems like the right time also, to give a special shout-out to Neelam Gurung, who has been writing absolutely stunning poems in Nepali, and even though there isn’t much of an audience that understands the language in the group, she has consistently and fearlessly produced works that have held the most beautiful thoughts within them. Take a bow Neelam, for the fierceness and for continuing to inspire us!
POEMS OF THE WEEK 004:
Alright then, here are the top three poems from this week, followed by some special shout-outs to a few poets for some absolutely stunning stanzas.
“over the snow that feels no pity,
whose white hands can give no healing,
the fox drags its wounded belly.”
it’s natural for a wound to blossom,
to hinge itself onto ripe flesh
staining you like worn ceramic,
the snow hides your trail
so you will never find your pain again
it is now one with an avalanche,
for burial has always lived within it,
the essence of the moon rests in its craters,
a story beyond the blinding
of birthmarks and tear stains
bearing the snippets left out of legacies,
teaching circles of imperfection,
a mirage is born of thirst
an inconsolable need to drown,
it drinks emerald from your iris
floats on within salt, and vision,
the essence of water
is in the way it holds you,
fingers combing through hair
a lullaby to the flesh
cradling every bit of your skin,
slowly and then all at once,
arms wrapped into confluences
your scars are more estuary
less cataclysm,
and sleep is restful now
a mirage born of thirst,
a coffin that fits well,
tears divide a body from its grief
soften the soil with the pain,
and permeance is a quality of this earth,
I sow a broken arm
only to find autumn dangling over my shoulder,
and pine trees smell like the first time I saw you
but it is hard to find romance
among leaves unhinging themselves,
the essence of a cyclone is in its eye
its relentless calm,
watching the devastation in its limbs
listening to desolation in its wake,
cursed to bear witness
to its own.
— Tanay Sane
*The first three lines have been borrowed from R.S.Thomas’s ‘January’ in the book Identity, Environment and Deity.
“I stayed here, motionless,
Thinking of who is gone.”
I let the morning pass me by,
and the afternoon sun form contours
on my ceiling.
I let the wind tip-toe through the window
I let the doors rattle,
shiver and shudder,
at the news of an incoming storm.
I left the beans in the freezer,
the flame still burning,
a vessel of tea has boiled and spilt
some twenty two times;
I left
the radio still blabbering,
the television gleaming
with its endless chatter.
Today I let the walls spread their arms
they are now cracking at the surface,
I think
I can hear them
laughing,
in sync with the jingling
of the keys.
I let this house be.
And to amuse myself,
I started a rumour for the mirror,
I heard you were coming.
— Samreen Chhabra
*Lines in quotes by Roland Barthes.
“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
I’ll sing.”
I’ll sing of the garlands I’ve made
With dead songs, half sung, half swallowed
Rattling against each others like
Broken conches. Sonorous.
Strung together by equally empty words
That mean nothing; but sound melodious.
Hold them close to your ears
You’ll feel the rough edges against
Your baby-soft skin.
Can you hear the waves roll?
High…low…high…low
Guided by winds, salty, like my skin
When fear comes in the form of bruises
Caused by the sharp edges of
Your anger, red like the devil.
Purple like his shadow
Yellow like his eyes
And black like your soul.
I’ll sing.
I’ll sing of my soul.
Mud-caked, dried and cracked
Like the outsoles of burnt-out
Hiking shoes that have walked on trails
Trampling on signs
That could lead
To safety, salvation and love.
I’ll sing that weary song
Stuck in my head since ages
Pulsating and raging
Passing through various stages
Of days and months
Of the past, or passing, or to come.
Who knows?
What I might become.
— Meghna Nair
*The first two lines of the poem are borrowed from ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ by W.B. Yeats.
SPECIAL SHOUT-OUTS:
This list is not limited but here are some of our favourite excerpts from some of the poems. This week was the toughest to judge, but at the same time most wonderful in terms of the reading experience:
- Rishitha Shetty—
In the bowl you made with your own lovely hands
two ants will
not meet at the gentle curve.
When water drips from the tip of the finger to the dip in your palm,
it will first circle the calluses,
chase ants out of the way
and then slide between
the casual dissonance of palm-lines.
There is a little purple vein that breaks
out of the fleshy pinkness of your thumb-
if this were to be a guiding line of sorts,
the ants will only circle it once.
Your wrist will try to capture the randomness of your palm in each throb,
but patterns, like a smoke screen will only hide chaos for so long.
After that, one ant will slide inside your fingernail
while the other chases the
droplets on your palm.
2. Pavithra Sreekumar—
Let go,
you are not the yin to someone’s yang,
you are not proportions,
held accountable by a man,
by yourself,
you are a crescent as much as you are whole.
Find the night that throws you up like a flag,
holds you there every night,
and watches you turn,
into moon into sun into starlight,
into everything you are.
And you are,
a woman in all your damn right,
waxing and waning,
to all the waters of the Earth.
What drives the wind,
to whisper into leaves and lips;
you are not distant anymore,
and you will not be measured,
in halves anymore.
3. Vasanthi Swetha—
The ends of my forehead
are also called the temple.
I move my thumb
tracing a circular pattern
over and over again,
as though I am rewinding
and forwarding a cassette
that was as old as
a prayer that was whispered
and forgotten.
I repeat my name like
someone who had heard it
for the first time
confirming the pronunciation;
to see if it sounded like me,
or if my voice was just an echo
of someone’s breath.
4. Kiana Manian—
Sometimes we forget how incredible it feels, to let go
of the only things we thought we knew
Landscapes that were somehow interred with our bones while we were
Still alive,
Or just asleep and sometimes the earth cannot tell the difference
Like when lines between dreams start blurring into waking hours
Half shut blinds till the day begins
I always knew exactly what to do with my day, which I guess
Is to say I’ve never had a clue
The idea of deep sea diving always felt more like
the fear of drowning until you see
Coral reefs and sea anemones that spark and curl through whitish sea foam
And how much of this world have we left unexplored
How much of our eyes have we to open, our lungs to fill
How often have we found ourselves so lost in our minds that we
forget to take walks through our capillaries
Feel crimson between the ridges of our fingers
Shape our mouths around new words for fear of pronouncing them wrong
5. Divya Garg—
रातों की स्याही दिखती है
बिखरी हुई किताबों के पन्नों पर
गहरी हो जाती है हर इक दफ़ा
जब भी देखता हूँ इन्हें मैं
उलट पलट कर देखता हूँ हज़ार मरतबा
नया एक अफ़साना ढूँढ निकालने को
आकार नहीं लेते ये शब्द कोई
हाँ कभी किसी रोज़
एक ख़याल सा उभर आता है, ज़रूर
बेपरवाह अरमान हों जैसे
आज़ाद हो जाने को
अपनी ही पहचान तलाशते
ख़ुद अपने अकस से जूझते
खोयी ही पहचान को पहचानते
ना जाने कहाँ से चल के कहाँ तक जाने को
या फिर नया आसमान पाने को
हाँ
रातों की स्याही दिखती है
तन्हाई को मिटाने को
ना कह के भी सब कुछ कह जाने को
रातों की स्याही दिखती है
मुझसे रूबरू मुझे करा जाने को
If you’re wondering what the 2018 100-Poem Challenge is all about, you can read about it here!
See you next week, where we’ll bring the best of week 005 for you!
Disclaimer: The copyright for each poem included in this blog belongs to the poet to which they have been attributed.
