Category: Uncategorized
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Just a note.
Reading Tranströmer’s poetry and I realize that I need more absence, more silence, more blankness. Two words are too much. One word standing alone on a page. Maybe even one word is too much. The written must be as transparent as the unwritten. I want my writing to echo the sound of silence. “The sound of…
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Seamus Heaney / Blackberry Picking
If I were to pick one poem about love, it would probably be this one. – S. Blackberry Picking Late August, given heavy rain and sun for a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first…
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Dreams I
Last night, I was in Sweden. Everything looked like a scene from a Bergman film. I remember no colour except black, white and light. A cafe filled with people. Someone brings me a pitcher filled with some cocktail. I take off my shirt. I look at everyone and no one looks at me. A dream.…
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Poetics / A poem by Manuel Bandeira
I’m sick of cautious lyricism of well behaved lyricism of a civil servant lyricism complete with time card office hours set procedures and expressions of esteem for Mr. Boss, Sir. I am sick of the lyricism that has to stop in midstream to look up the precise meaning of a word. Down with…
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On Mayakovsky and Raduga Publications, Moscow.
One of the few things I remember reading as a child is Mayakovsky’s poem What is Good and What is Bad in Hindi. I had a beautifully illustrated copy published by Raduga Publications from Moscow, U.S.S.R. There used to be mobile vans all around Jaipur selling books published By Raduga. The prices used to be…
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Tonight.
This evening, I wore a melancholy dress. And each time the sunlight almost disappeared, I thought of you. I haven’t told you, dear, that I have never had a kiss that I liked. And that each night, before dreaming, my memory plays Schubert’s Valses Sentimentales. And sometimes, not always, I think of the love we…
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Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day. From Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet
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I have been visiting cities.
No dog on the road? I had a dream today in the afternoon where I point at all the streets and teach a child this song: “Nothing happens on this street. Or on that. Do you see that road going uphill? Nothing happens there either and bored it comes back down.” And repeat. Trees have…
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Rain.
I have an exam tomorrow. But, it’s raining. I feel a little cold. Cold, now, will always remind me of London. It was drizzling the night I landed. The person who came to pick me up (a relative) took me on a walking tour of the city right from the airport. We got off the…
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I remember a handmade planchette board. My parents and my uncle and aunt. I sat there with a notebook and a pen in anticipation of a spirit. And, someone suggested we call Mirza Ghalib. Mirza Ghalib! After some minutes, a spirit arrived. “My name is Ghalib.” I noted it down in my notebook. My…
Beyond Six Rivers 