FOUR POEMS BY KASHIANA SINGH

Kashiana Singh is a management professional by job classification and a work practitioner by personal preference. Kashiana’s TEDx talk was dedicated to Work as Worship. Her poetry collection, Shelling Peanuts and Stringing Words presents her voice as a participant and an observer. She dips into very vulnerable and personal contexts but also explores the shifting tectonic plates of the world around her.

She is from India, now lives in Chicago and bridges the miles by regularly etching her thoughts. She is a regular contributor to different poetry platforms like OnMogul, Literary Yard, Best Poems, Narrow Mag, Modern Literature, Women’s Web, Tuck Magazine, Spillwords, Visual Verse and with Scott Thomas Outlar. She is in the process of gathering her second collection of poems.

All Rights Reserved by Kashiana Singh

1.

Petrichor

Feather droplets, uncertain and fickle

a standing ovation, trickle by trickle

Rooftops lay flat against a tiptoe dance

a gushing lullaby to an apocalyptic trance

2.

Noor

I know a Noor
She is seventeen

She is insatiable

She is possessed

She has likes and dislikes

infinitum

She does not like legacies of silence
Relishes eggplants and turnips her grandma makes
She does not like perfumes
Her fury is aroused by a wild musk
She does not like mirrors
They break her infinite shadows
She does not like wild drinking
Her vice is dipping rusk in chai
She does not like hesitation
Her voice arouses a vocal soprano
She does not like being told, instructed
Heartbeats pierce through her like an easterly
She does not like flowers, plucked
Has an addiction to wild dandelions
She does not like corsets, or foolish tales, retales
Unburdens her seat at every table
She does not like riding pillion
Unfettered she seduces the wind
She does not like nightly ceremonies
Virgin’s milk, plaited hair long discarded
She does not like permissions
Her entrails pound a curious honey

I know a Noor
She permeates every minute

She is painfully present
Her eyes opal daggers

Her neck a river
Her breasts surging mystery

Her legs anchored to her ship, as

her impetuousness sails full throttle
into a churning sea, pulsating with
likes and dislikes

She is not
a weekend edition of feminism
She is a noor*

*noor – holy soulful light

 3. 

Barefooted they walk

Incredible India
coffee book canvas
multi-dimensional presence
of
giant statues
loud bells
louder chants
dawn prayers
marble upon marble
lights upon lights
wasted wax
from devotional candles
sits forever in stubs
like dwarfed men
who light them
bargaining with
a God
advertised in plenty

barefooted they walk, timidly
discarding shoes, of all shapes
sizes, colors. shoes of all people
hindu, muslim, sikh, christian, old
young, bard, barber, woman and
girls, even the bad ones who force
honor killings, or rape, and shoes
of gays, lesbians, hijras, that have
flowers embroidered in nauseating
colors, shoes of all caste, creed
and shoes of those with no shoes
barefooted they walk, careful
feet tip toe through the last lap
of cleansing rituals, they stride

through mehndi and monkeys
into their hanuman’s temple
through an aromatic langar
served in halls of Bangla sahib
through her virgin Sacredness
into the heart of their Church
through an elevating qawwali
cathartic at Hazrat Nizzamudin
through blossoming petals
of their famous lotus temple
through quietness of Buddha
into Lakshmi Narayan’s abode
through the spiritual largeness
of Akshardham illuminated at night
through the urging sandstone
into the calm of Jama masjid

barefooted they walk, timidly
they walk the length and breadth
of a mutilated constitution, the
north, south, east, west;

an entire country circumcised

of courage
an entire country in disguise
meanwhile

I disappear to find solace

in the prize winning
essay, I once wrote, it was titled
‘unity in diversity’

4. 

Eleven Photographs

Rain rubbing shoulders, a hesitant earth

Earthworms, mud froth, flooded ant homes

A grave, firma turf bursting forth, snails crawling out in remembered commonness, fungus in smells and scents, deadness erupts, scavenging sourness in cilantro leaves, a rain rustling through thickets in a drunken rustling| I am

Flipping through a story teller’s album|In an attic that smells of corpses| Translucent years on paper|Crumpled taste of dinner table discourses|Every page has remnants| Hesitant footprints and fallen scabs| Bloody ketchup stains| A grain of coriander| Weary threads of frayed wool| Rose petals mocking| Lifetimes and lifelines concealed in glue dots| An alchemist at work| Chess boarding time on album pages|

I stumble upon photographs| There are Eleven|

Opaque images of me in my mama’s kitchen|

There are Eleven

One

I am stirred kitchen pot of bubbles

a melancholy rehearsal on repeat

Two

I am an orchestra of wondrous gathering

of spices, flavors and secrets

Three

I am an alchemy of yin and yang

of rum with chocolate syrup

Four

I am a pitcher of iced panna

a keeper of syrups and sour

Five

I am a bowl of mango strips, lemon

an explosion of poems in teaspoons

Six

I am a page of sonnets filling empty water sips

a winner chuckling with conviction of taste

Seven

I am a bowl of milky crusty caramel

of melting sadness on burnt edges

Eight

I am an avalanche of fudgy brown bites

of humming into an overflow of sweet

Nine

I am an earthen platter of pickled promises

a crisp bite supplements prosaic day

Ten

I am a texture of overcast ginger and garlic

of diminishing appetites in bland curries

Eleven

I am an anthology of preserved scars

of surprises lingering on cleansed palates

FIVE POEMS BY LOPA BANERJEE INCLUDING A 'SAKHA' ONE.

Lopamudra Banerjee:

Lopa is an author, poet, editor and translator, currently based in Dallas, Texas, but originally from Calcutta, India. Her memoir 'Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant's Wayward Journey' was a First Place Category Winner at the Journey Awards 2015 and also received honorary mention at The Los Angeles Book Festival 2017. Her recent book of poetry and memoir, 'Woman and Her Muse' has also received critical acclaim and been featured in various journals and newspapers including The Sunday Statesman, Kolkata, and is now part of prestigious libraries in India and USA. Her poetry, stories and essays have been published in various literary e-zines, print anthologies and lit journals both in India, UK and USA. She has received the International Reuel prize for poetry (2017) and for translating Tagore's fiction (2016) and is currently a creative writing instructor/faculty in Dallas, USA. 

 Her recent works include ''All That Jazz and Other Tales (upcoming), and also 'Kolkata Cocktail', a poetry film collaboration to be released in December 2019.  This photo is a still from the film.

For Simone De Beauvoir

[A reaction after reading parts of ‘The Second Sex’ by Simone De Beauvoir, French writer, intellectual philosopher, political activist, feminist, and reflecting on them as a woman from the Indian subcontinent.]

The last time I woke up,

I remember, I demanded a third space.

A space that meandered

from the hopscotch square

Of estrogen games, from the erectile brain

of testosterone urges.

A space of my own desperation of belongings

‘The Second Sex’, a requirement of my syllabus,

An elusive continent, a vociferous sea,

A torrid landscape of my own making.

Simone, I hadn’t known your name

The feel of that fiercely unwomanly woman 

When in my girlhood, cascading beauty

Of princesses and heroines spilled

all over our barren courtyard,

from the basket of my grandmother’s tales.

Love was the promise of a sanctioned cacophony

Of children to be birthed, the language of coercion

As kings banished queens for sons not born,

Princes’ lip-locked with princesses,

‘Hail thee, patriarchy!’  

The last time you twisted and turned us

In our dreams and sold us a ticket to witness

The vestiges of war between our own troubled selves,

I remember, we had pushed some boundaries,

But there were some barbed wires

which were better left on their own.

The last time your words entered my realm,

“One is not born, but becomes a woman,”

I remember the dark hunger, the denial,

The act of letting go, the truth of our beings.

Simone, we, the ‘other sex’, reborn, recycled

A zillion times, have been churned, fermented

Reclaiming our spaces in the fickle humanity.

Instruction Manual: How To Be That Badass Poet

How to turn to a badass poet

from a domestic goddess is easy.

Just unlearn your cuteness for the essential dark,

Stay on in the pitch-park galaxy,

marinated in sacrosanct words.

Play on in the tumultuous sea of sounds,

metaphors, diction of old poets

Take a line from here, a whiplash of pain from there,

A jingle, a whisper and a surreptitious peak

from the flammable past.

And then, in your own sticky canvas,

shed them off, along with

Your engaged arms, your heaving breasts,

your womb and birth canal,

Replace them all, the sexist jargons you learnt,

And lucid memories of labor

with your nascent, blood-soaked poetry.

Then, after you knead the dough

Of fickle human stories,

Divide the dough into little sacred mounds of word-flesh,

Born from your ancestral womb

Into the cradle of feminine fantasies.

And then, slowly, crisply deep fry them

with tenderness and affliction,

Fry them some more like children birthed

post the gestation period,

As you try to make a home

out of the vestiges of war within you,

The rubble of the overgrown cities within you,

Born between your immigrant dreams,

your becoming, your unbecoming.

To become a badass poet, to be reborn

A hundred times is as easy as it can get.

Only speak to the unfamiliar earth

with your unbridled wet body every time you see

A smoke of an unborn poem, a triggered survival act.

Only speak to your displaced self in the language

Of desperate desires, your tattered earth and sky.

For a non-lover

[Dedicated to the fiery daughter of Bangladesh, feminist author and poet Taslima Nasrin, inspired by her Bengali poem ‘Ek Opremiker Jonnyo’. A trans-creation.]

You and I will live in the same city,

You will run helter-skelter, spiraling around me

On the pretext of work, to fuel your own wantonness.

Somewhere near, you will chit-chat in your leisure,

Booze, shout, create an uproar, while rejoicing.

Then, the dark night will fall asleep, but you will remain awake.

In the evenings, you might go for dinners

To some Goddamn neighbor’s places, for playing,

Who knows, for even taking off a neighbor woman’s sari?

Who knows, her house might be just a stone’s throw away

From my courtyard!

You will stroll along the same roads as I do, remain within my grasp,

You might even let me know one day, you are staying this close to me,

Everyday. I will shrink, shred my own self into zillion pieces

In the pangs of our separation, yet never welcome you, never ever.

Never will I give you the chance to let me know how busy you have been

These days, that you have no time…I will save myself from

Your loveless apathy. You and I will never meet.

Years will go by, but you and I will never meet.

And then, the nothingness of not meeting you for years

Will let me forget how it had been, the experience of meeting you.

I will forget the color of your shirt, I will forget

How you looked when you smiled, how you dug your nails

When we talked, whether you ever looked into my eyes while speaking

Or somewhere else. I will forget whether you moved

Your feet, stood up from the chair frequently, drank water

Never meeting you for all these years, I will forget how you looked,

Where were the moles in your face, or if they were there, at all.

I will forget how your kisses felt, how it felt when you entangled

My hair, how it felt when your face was buried in my bosom.

Years will go by, but you and I will never meet.

We will breathe in the same city, but our paths will never collide,

Even mistakenly. Both of us will fall sick, but never meet

At the end of our familiar alley, at the petrol pump,

At the fish market, or in a restaurant.

Then, many years later, when an ardent evening

Will rush inside my solitary room with its sudden bursts of light,

When I will stand, forlorn, at the verandah and the wild breeze

Of Vaishakh will blow away my sari, I will talk to the moon

The whole night, filling the sky to the brim.

I will tell you then, silently, what is lost if we never meet?

It was preposterous to think that we would die if

We would never see each other again.

Whosoever said it is true?

I never met you in a thousand years, does that mean

I never lived?

I know now what I would tell you. I have pondered over it.

The truth is, you are just an embodiment of nothingness.

I had only crafted you with my fervent wants,

It was me who had crafted you as my lover,

It is me again who crafts you as a non-lover.

I can even live for a million years without seeing you,

Without touching a non-lover, forever.

My teardrop can usher in like torrential rain,

Wiping away all that had been painted,

Wiping away your name, your existence in one swift motion.

Do not think I am living alone,

Your loveless apparition lives with me, always.

*Vaishakh: The first month of the Bengali calendar. 

The Burning

Sakha mine

I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.

The crescent moon has burnt inside my bosom

Turning into a full moon, an exquisite flame of my self-chosen exile.

The fortnight has meandered from the path of the silken morning

To the surreptitious route of the pitch-dark night,

My body has scalded, bore a few burn marks at the turn of every single dusk,

leading to the dark, exiled night.

The earth has grown a few shades darker,

the morning, sucking it’s deep, black exile full throttle.

I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.

Are you the one who tore open the petals of my nude, feminine verses?

Sakha, are you the secret slayer, the silent demon

Eating away, insect-like, the deep blue pathos 

of the universe of my lyrics, one tiny bite at a time?

Are you the one who made Time your greatest ally,

Gave me the poison ivy with passion brimming

all over your betrayer of a body, mingling with mine?

I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.

Sakha, remember the last night that you made me 

your partner in the luscious bed,

The dark, moonless night had merged with my fearless surrender.

My morsels were all yours, the devil of my forbidden wants 

was born out of your fierce verses.

Today, my poems scald with every stroke of the night

The silent, overgrown city inside me burns in its impossible dreams.

The green of my faith, easily born, is turning into the grey ashes of treachery.

Dreamless, moonless, my Home, my land,

my comfort zones burn, what is done cannot be undone.

I didn’t craft poetry for a fortnight now.

Sakha, your burnt out poetry, your dark undone

Is my home now, where can I flee?

Indianness:  The Metaphor of the Misfit 

My Indianness is the bookmark

of sweaty summer musk,

Tucked within the creases

of a self-same, overused book

In the slice of space where

memories of rickshaw-rides

And an old ghaat lay suspended

in a remembered patch of air.

My Indianness is the honks of buses,

yellow cabs and the odd stir

And jerky moves of local trains

 and subways in a jetlagged return

To another home, responding

to a speck of reason.

The froth of my bangla catch-phrases,

in unwarranted, white-infested places. 

My Indianness is the shameless squirt of inabilities

Which makes me an oddity

in a land where new sojourns

are embarked on, new road turns are made,

with pronounced insolence.

My Indianness is my scorching inferno,

as I shuttle between safe-same chores.

My Indianness is my white wallet

purchased from the dollar store

The chain of it that opens up

to reveal two pockets,

One carrying dollars in five, ten,

the other, rupee notes saved

From auto-rickshaw rides, a fleeting whiff

of homes and hearths, abandoned.

My Indianness is the everyday injury

which I can’t bury always, safely.

The fervent flicker of memories,

the occasional dents in the brain

unfazed by changing colors,

the blinding maze of lanes, by-lanes, highways 

When all around me, the sweet lure of amnesia

wins over others so easily.

My Indianness taunts me

as I dream of houses moved in, in my slumber

Houses with cement stairs

and the sparks of tube-light,

and crickets chirping

Outside large glass windows

covered with white blinds. 

As I hang on a thin rope,

flanked by odorless comforts and dusky sorrows.

I write verses, stories on diaspora,

my Indianness, a nameless brook

That craves to be one with a mighty river,

a vain promise to dilute

Thick foams of whiplashes,

onslaughts, residues of soot.

My Indianness is the perpetual rebellion,

the telltale signs of embracing mess.

Ghaat: River-bank

Rickshaw: A vehicle used in India and some other Asian countries, a light, hooded vehicle resembling a three-wheeled bicycle, sometimes hand-pulled, having a seat for passengers behind the driver.

Bangla: Bengali, the Indic language spoken in Kolkata (India) and other parts of northeastern India and Bangladesh.

  All Rights Reserved. Lopa Banerjee. November 13, 2019  

Await more from Kashiana Singh, Santosh Bakaya, Don Yorty etc

FIVE POEMS BY DONALL DEMPSEY

Donall Dempsey was Ireland's first Poet in Residence in a Secondary School. He has appeared on Irish radio and television. He has been translated into Spanish and Italian and Urdu. Donall has read at festivals in France and India and Ireland He organises a monthly spoken word event in Guildford as well as being editor with his wife janice of Dempsey and Windle Publishing. He is a Reuel International Prize ecertificate winner and appeared in The Significant League's Significant Anthology.

None of these poems can be republished without written permission from him as this blog is under legal copyright or without legal repercussions if used without his permission. All rights belong to him.



"...IN FORGETFUL SNOW..."

Flake by flake

Heaven falls

until its whiteness

covers all.

Angels guard

their dead.

All is quiet.

All is light.

Even marble flesh

feels the cold.

The dead have forgotten

Christmas.

A Christmas the angels

have never known.

A forgotten bicycle

half there-half not

looking like an art

installation

until it too succumbs

to the snow's will.

The silence slowly

erasing the world.

A raven perches

upon an angel's wing.

She pays it

no mind

gazing with sightless eyes

as land and sky become one.

Even the horizon is

being filled in.

The raven's

harsh voice.

***


THE DUSK FOX

the fox acknowledges

with an imperceptible  nod

the arrival of dusk

dusk and the fox

becoming one

entering the world of humans

the fox is busy

being a fox

stops: paw raised

the fox goes

in and out of

time

appearing now

disappearing as if

it had stepped out of the world

the dusk no longer

exists

night falls with my footfall

as if on cue

synchronised to time

and light

the fox stares  at me

beyond me...I am

a walking shadow

the yellow street light

stains us for a moment

we vanish from each other

tomorrow sees

dusk and fox

keep the same appointment

only I

am absent

. . .

***

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR

Auden & Isherwood

strolling in China

trying to soak up

The War

by the process of

osmosis

staining it

with words

observe

(at first what seems)  

green horses

but turns out to be

only white horses

painted green

for camouflage purposes.

That evening in Canton

also offering them

the futility of two men

trying to put a rat

into a bottle

a woman who lived

in a beehive

pouring water

into a sieve.

War knocks

over the inkwell

spills

into men’s lives

covers the white pages

of their wishes

makes the idea of Hell

...all   too   real.

The spilt ink eating

the words of men

who send letters home

and die in pain

never to return

only in other’s memories

& useless dreams

marble memorials

while green horses

champ the grasses

the bridles & the bits

clanking & glinting

in the hot sun

of Now.

as this last lost evening

dies.

***


SILENCE IS FASTER GOING BACKWARDS

He stepped outside

of himself.

Closed the door

of reality

behind him

with a sharp short click.

"Where had the time gone?"

he asked of a mirror.

"There is no time here!"

answered the reflection.

"So this is...eternity?"

he heard his thought say.

He took another step

left behind this world of flesh.

Here, where

not even memory

...persists.

***

NO MOON AT ALL

She cries because

there is no moon

in her window.

And can she sleep

with you and mummy

because....

there is a moon

in your window.

She drifts to sleep

in the harbour of our arms.

The moon asks

"Can I go now?"

I nod a yes.

Watch it tiptoe away.

Careful not to

wake her.

***

Future posts include Lopa Banerjee, Kashiana Singh, Santosh Bakaya, Don Yorty, Daipayan Nair ( a feature on Tideling poems), and many others.