Samia's new blog

samiasingh.wordpress.com

MORE NEWS

Shyamli made one of the best pixtella's in her class.
Farewell to Aditi, Shyamli, Prerna and Roanna too.
Last I heard Roanna was doing a kind of film on the MAIS Principal with Philly.
Aditi was doing the creative writing course. Along with Shyamli, Aashim etc.
Prerna is still writing.
Pol Science is much in many people's thoughts these days. Radha Mahendru, for instance.
Tejus wrote something on Taare zameen par, which I thought a worthy attempt..
The show must go on as does the bandwagon.
I'm reading Lila by Robert M Pirsig, a book given to me by Pratap, and doing research on Bob Dylan, writing to friends and writing, in that order.
Arka is busy traveling and performing.
Avy has superb stuff written and put up on his blog.
http://avygravy.blogspot.com/
Am I like a rat deserting a sinking ship?

Phantastikon - modern Tagore

Hooked.

My voice has many shades.
It pours out of my inner body,
Throat and neck.
At the end, empty
I feel like a fool
And wait anxiously
For anything,
Even an echo,
In return.
But as usual, nothing -
Silence.
I switch off,
Nauseated by, my voice;
Switched on,
Permeated by, your Silence

Till the next, time.

What is poetry?

Ezra Pound said: Literature is language charged to the uttermost with meaning.
If so: Poetry is langauge charged to the uttermost with significance. - Koshy.
Poetry is prayer. - Samuel Beckett.
Phanopoeia
Melopoeia
Logopoeia
That is poetry. Plagiarized from the Grecians via Pound.
Amen.

News

Roshan is back and still writing, wrintg poetry and doing it well
Look at his blog often, please.

Goodbye Couplet

Should have had time to split a beer
But - am too busy, and the time, too near.
:)

More news for and of the lycralyricists.

Roshan is somewhere in some forest figuring out whether to write or not and the validity of poetry.
Samia, Aashim and Pratap are all fed up with design but not with art and literature.
Aashim's working on his mother's poems , hoping to illustrate them and has publishers lined up.
We still want to bring out a lycralyricist collection of poems,
Culling out the best from this blog,
Vaibhav has written a book that may get published by UNICEF.
Ashwin is busy doing his dip film with Vinay Ghodgeri. Promises to be good.
I'm leaving Bangalore on October 2nd - Gandhi Jayanthi - and India on October 3rd.
I will be in King Abdul Aziz University, English Language Centre, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and hopefully they allow use of mail and gtalk.
All this has some kind of cosmic significance no doubt.
"we are stardust/we are glowing"

Poetry makes nothing happen

In you, in others,
In all around
I see
By change, or chance
Or
Mystery's decree.

Can't be scanned
Anymore than
Feelings can.

This Wingspan.

Never paid (me) a single cent
Yet
(I) pay for the privyleague.

My palm spread
A-cross, your cups
Local area networks pan.

Make something happen?
Un-open, unhand?

Our liquid gold for your finest starland.

Be done by as you did - the poem I read out, edited.

If anyone has a moment to spare
Listen, please:
They're killing our brothers and sisters like mice;
Some hide in the jungles to get away
From the death-bringers.

Don't Christians in Orissa have eyes?
Are they not human? Are you truly Advaits?
Do you really think you're Arjuns who've run
The gamut of the karmic wheel?
No. The Jaganath's chariot rolls on
And will crush beneath its mighty rim
Your women and children
Or make them join
The party of those you hated enough to kill.

History has many contrived, cunning corridors,
Blood violently sown always reaps its desire.
Not as one thinks. It turns against
The ones who made it unjustly stream.
See, see, Christ's blood streaming in the firmament.
One drop could have saved Faust but he just couldn't
Get hold of it, nor any drop.

I wish you'd taken a leaf out of Sree Narayana Guru's book
Who said in reply to Gandhiji's query
Should conversion be allowed?,
Whatever the religion,
It's enough man improves.
But you've probably never heard of Sree Narayana Guru.
If you'd been there at that conversation,
You'd have killed him.
Now you've appropriated him in my naadu.
The kind of pretentious thing quasi-intellectuals do;
What the Pharisees did with the prophets
After persecuting them.

George Bush Jr., Advani and Osama bin Laden
Saddam, Khomeini, Hitler and Stalin
Togadia and the Hindutva murderers,
And the Taliban and terrorists of every other hue
This plain-speaking, harsh, so-not-a-poem
Tells you the hell of hatred is all that's left to you
Unless metanoia comes, as it yet may, strangely,
Even as it did once to a Saul of Tarsus!

And you others who have never seen how
The maruts caressed their ordinary faces
The faces of the dead ones, green twigs snapped to pieces
So suddenly
Just as zephyrs still do yours
Or don't know they too heard the kisses of tender lips brush by
Touched thunder rolling across wild, green places
Tasted the nectar of raindrops on the sly
You who never smelled the scent of the Oriya Christian's sweat
To realize it had the same sweet, sour, tear-stained smell as in your armpits,
You indifferent ones, continue pretending until
One day they come for you too with their tridents
And there is no one left to help you by then
Because you purposefully did not intervene
(In your turning away from everything but your petty lives)
Though they were -only - Shylocks, like you,
Not trouble-makers going around
Carrying pictures of chairman Mao,
To make it with anyone, anyhow.

Nothing else I can do at present but write
& pray and love the Logos and believe.
I write all this just to let you know
I am trying to walk in the footsteps of the dead
And their loved ones whom you didn't consider human
The martyrs' blood relatives, their spiritual kin, and their wives and children
Who have to forgive you all, now
You and you and yours and yours
Like Staines' wife once publicly did.

Blood seeds the hearts of the next Generation.
Of those who are like-minded.
Like Jesus
Buddha, a nameless Zen master
Lincoln, Ramana Maharshi
Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
& Nelson Mandela and Tiananmen's students.

Behold, Mahabharath, I show you a miracle.
By the time your next pogrom comes around
Our tribes would have increased,
With rhyme, without reason.
Dark, sand- coloured cockroaches in your tumultuous barns,
Unquenchable, like your innocent children's eyes.
May they shine endlessly, in the play of lights,
Like little Chinese lanterns, like pretty Indian diyas
Or Mozart's twinkling stars that still make some of us marvel
In the distant reaches of the unfettered sky
Candling and beaconing us to some beautiful thing Else.

May man as he is today never set foot there
Except he dares to change beyond hatred's dare.

by A.V.Koshy

Ruchika - finding the flow

DEW-DROP

Dew-drop

On a leaf top

A universe within itself

Sliding and twisting

Hopping from one leaf to the other

Gliding towards destiny?

The quest cannot be completed

The thirst unquenched

Unless and until

It loosens itself fully

Destroys self

To meet the river

Flowing under the tree

Unnoticed

Carrying carefully

Uncountable siblings and lovers

Together?

Samia - self/reflection

It is I I detest

not you

for you are not

affected by anything,

not by me.

I am.

I scatter them thorns

carefully,

around every door and window

and keyhole

that I see,

I scatter them thorns

while I take my shoes off.

For I wish not to escape.

For I am scared,

I am scared

of my failure,

of the moment

I will know

I am not

what I think myself to be.

I paint dark shadows

I think them thoughts

that are poison,

that do nothing

but grow

into more, multi-rooted, underground

beneath my skin,

beneath the words,

beneath my eyes.

I poison myself

for I am afraid

I have entered

Into a wrong turn.

And I cannot grow here.

I poison myself

for I am with you now,

and this is not

how I played it out

to be.

I poison,

as I am lesser

everyday.

The better bits of me

have vanished.

Rotten,

fallen off,

stuck in distant places-

all that remains is this

decay.

This mass

I hate to call myself.

News update

hope you guys keep looking at roshan's blog - there's damn good poetry still coming up on it

http://fromsoultosand.blogspot.com/

Dear, dear friends, lycralyricists of all hues, sizes, ages, and colours and shapes.....et al

I will be reading a poem or two along with Arka at the Maya Contemporary Art Gallery on Nandi Durga road or thereabouts on this Sunday, Sept 7th. I hope you all come along and read your poems too. It will be good to get together once again. If you're coming please reach there by 6.45 because Arka seems to have put in some stuff about registration and such- like things which is needed for things to go in an orderly manner I'm sure.... come along for old time's sake and also as a kind of last/middle/first appearance of all of us together....!!!!! Can't really say not knowing the future.
I promise to read out my poem in a way that will hopefully (not) rock the house.
Arka will correct me I suppose/guess if any of the details here are wrong....

A Poem for a Grandmother

For Mahamaya Sarkar, died September 13th, 1984.

I remember not crying.
At four o' clock the school bus had dropped me
At the appointed place, like everyday.
I don't quite remember who'd picked me up, now.
I remember asking after you, suddenly, and being told
You had 'gone off to god', which I could make no sense of.
I remember being startled by many strange faces.
I don't remember your face too well,
I remember a white clad figure on the cot,
I remember playing with your lips, opening them
Giving you funny faces. You did not resist.
That wasn't surprising - you never did.
I remember your teeth were somewhat brown.
I was hurriedly pulled away by adult hands -
I don't remember whose.
I remember you had made 'tribal costumes' for me
Out of palm leaves, and crowns that had cost no blood,
And flutes I could not play.
I remember you wearing both your glasses to amuse me,
And when asked how you looked, I'd promptly said, 'like an ape'.
You almost fell down from your chair, laughing.
You never had any money to speak of, yet when you came,
All the way across town, your hands were never empty.
I expected them not to be - it was my right.
I remember, better than your face, your stories
Of a childhood in Tripura, coming home at sunset
On a buffalo, Men who'd been swallowed whole by pythons
But survived. I remember crying my heart out,
More than a month later, at Indira Gandhi's dead face
on the TV screen. Years, lost kingdoms and eternities later
I'd realize, that I cried for you.

by Arka Mukhopadhyay