Photophrastic - nimisha kavitha based on a click by Gauri Dixit

Lovers sat on those benches/ and husbands and wives who quarreled/ on separate ones/ some practiced social distancing/ by leaving the one in between empty/ tired people embraced them/and ones taking a break/then there were those who just wanted/to while away the time/ watching the petals falling/in warm weather or cold times/how many stories they could tell/perhaps this shows lockdown/benches, man-made, oft unused, petals and leaves, natural too, fallen/all subject to the chipping or yellowing wheel of time/ here caught in a moment of abeyance

My second collection of poetry or third one gets reviewed in Indian Literature

 

Repost: Parul Khakar's Shav Vahini Ganga translated by Dr Koshy AV (with a few changes)

Parul Khakkar's Shav Vahini Ganga (Corpse bearing/vehicle Ganga.)

Translated by Dr Koshy AV

Don't be sad but 'rejoice', say the corpses in one voice

O King, in your Ram Rajya!

We see the corpses floating in Ganga

Lord, the trees have all become ash

There is not even a speck of a place in the crematorium

There is no undertaker there or people to carry the corpses to the pyre

No one to sit near and cry

To those of us who lost everything, only the dance of death continues around us, O King

In your Ram Rajya, our corpses float around in the Ganga

Spitting smoke and spitting smoke, even the chimney is panting

The virus has caught us and is shaking us

Our bangles are breaking, and our insides are hurting, burning like fire

While the city is burning, the pandit is playing the veena

O King, in your Ram Rajya corpses floating through Ganga too I see

What pomp and power there was in your get up and style earlier

Now the city sees your real face

Say no excuse now but come out in the open and say loudly, loudly

That you are wearing nothing and have no ability and are lazy

And will not rest now at least but act, show us that!

Smoke rings rise and rise to touch the sky, the city is angry and seething

Don't you know that in your kingdom through Ganga the corpses are floating, at all?

Gala

 (Charles Hewitt, Gala Dali, 1955, source: Getty Images)

It is a dry time

The muses have taken a hiatus

The wasp in my room buzzes: All irritation

The child mourns

The slate grey sea does not stir in the absence of breeze

Then a bard sings outside

A single sweet note followed by a single sweet

Note

Somewhere other birds take it up again

It is Gala time

The dry bones/stones have allure on either sides of her back

Her gaze into the far distance seeks

I am out of sight, on the other side

The bird cries a single note

Another bird/bard flying on makes its own songs

I will go down and find company and solace with my child

Down the stairs in a surreal, dim-lit evening

Escape from the gathering gloom in my darkening room

Having now seen God and poetry in a woman's photographed & unvarnished hair, buttocks, and back.

2 Poems

 Slow, the vultures circle in the sky

Slowly the hyaenas walk on earth, and make an outcry

The snakes with small, squat, poisonous heads raise them

To strike, but are "mocked by a tissue that will not serve"

They shall all die and their bodies shrivel up

in forest and desert and city, village, town;

"hang in a pitiful crescent". In hell, fry.

2.

Flights of black birds in formation

overhead, going home

or to sleep

turn the evening into winged dreams

There are bruises on the sky

cuts and wounds -

part of the fact that birds can fly -

in the clouds

Red gashes

blue or black

turning the evening into

purple twilight and night

The birds continue their flight

looking effortless

Do they wish to be wingless

and grounded

with or like us here, down below

the way humans wish they could float, unwounded

in the air of the heavens; 'weightless', cutting a path

through, free, in endless flight?

The two quotes are from two poems by Samuel Beckett called the Vulture and Yoke of Liberty respectively