FIVE POEMS BY NISHI PULUGURTHA INCLUDING ONE ON DEMENTIA ON THIS 11.12.2019

Dr. Nishi Pulugurtha is Associate Professor in the department of English, Brahmananda Keshab Chandra College and has taught postgraduate courses at West Bengal State University, Rabindra Bharati University and the University of Calcutta. She is the Secretary of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, Kolkata (IPPL). Her research areas are British Romantic literature, Postcolonial literature, Indian writing in English, the literature of the diaspora, film and Shakespeare adaptation in film. Dr. Pulugurtha has presented papers at national and international conferences in India and abroad and has published in refereed international and national journals. She is a creative writer and writes on travel, film, short stories, poetry and Alzheimer’s Disease. Her work has been published in The Statesman, Kolkata, in the anthology Tranquil Muse and online - Café Dissensus, Coldnoon, Queen Mob’s Tea House and Setu. She guest-edited the June 2018 Issue of Café Dissensus on Travel. She has a monograph on  Derozio (2010) and a collection of essays on travel, Out in the Open (2019).

ALL RIGHTS FOR THESE POEMS BELONG TO THE AUTHOR.

     Hidden Beneath

Bonds broken

Trust betrayed

Hypocrisy all around

A materialistic world where things are more important

Where relationships do not matter –

Where ego reigns supreme

Where lies cover up

Camouflages all around

Layer on layer

All covered up

In smooth talk and smiles

It does drop off

The veneer, that is

In due course

To reveal the ugliness

The truth

It always does, but then the pain remains.

2.     It does find a way

Beside a wall that separates

The small plant seeps through

Breaking through a gap

Creating a crevice

Wild and green

It stands up steady

Breaking through the masonry

It does find a way somewhere, somehow

In a few days, the first violet bloom

Bright and cheerful

Smiling in the September sun

A few raindrops clinging onto

The leaves and flowers

Glistening,

The light reflecting through

It always does so.

3.     Looking at, Looking through

Huge leaves, gentling shaking

The plant, wild

Large holes in them

Nature at work

Holes that form patterns

No worms eating in

No disease or pestilence

Looking at them

Looking through them

There is so much the eye cannot see

Hidden behind

Here and there

The gaping holes reveal

They conceal

There is no design in all this

In nature

In the leaves that look up

And bend down.

4.     Mela

Vivid colours that meet the eye

Kettles brightly coloured

Ladles too, steel plates, glasses

On paper fortified with cloth

Each one tells a story

She sings the story

Woven with myths and folk tales.

Unrolling the canvas as she goes on.

Her parents did this too

Her grandparents too

She has come from afar

Her little son, sitting in front of her

A brush in his hand

Colours around him

He is looking for a ball

To play with

The colours do not interest him

He is going to be with her

Till the mela is on

Away from school

Away from studies

She says her wares do not bring her much

Difficult times stare at her

Her song goes on.

5.     Home 2

It was in a village there

Now, what was its name

I knew it, it was a big village

Beside my house was a big pond

Horen da caught fish in the pond

There were a few big trees too

What trees were they?

Green things hung, sour things

Later the green ones turned yellow

My brothers climbed up those trees.

I stood below, waiting for them.

Mango trees – one, two, three

Ma stood in the compound looking at us.

Now, that was home.

Not this building.

(A person who has dementia will often be at home and want to go home. What he/she means by home is difficult to comprehend, is it an older home, is it a childhood one? This poem is inspired by someone I knew who had dementia and who told stories of her childhood home)