SAMPLE POEMS

SANGAT HALDAR

Does It

How does it matter

whether you call or you don't

How does it matter

if there is a little retribution, a lot of heartburn, some unrequited love

and dollops of misunderstanding

well, I did try and I did fail
and I did remain a friend

and now maybe an enemy who happens to be a well-wisher

NINGOMBAN RABICHANDRA SINGH

Tsunami
                            
To prove you are still living,
Tugs and tugs down lives into deaths.
Pushing up and pulling down                                                                             
Willing to prey human amidst thick sand.
Where were you inspired?
Insatiable on obliterations of births’ foot marks.
Dead bodies on your intoxicated gust,
Fill and fill brimful every chengfu1.
Apportioning only a meruk2, from chengfu the bearing mother,
doling and doling out a moot3 each turn into the chengfu,
on such nurtured namu taibangs’4 turning into hillock of deaths,
happily  you laugh and sway yourself as king.
Tsunami, why too jealous of the livings.
Never a day moratorium on mutual killings,
Not a pause on mutual quarellings.
You too arduous to speak yourself as one.
Your strenuous participation in it,
Is it only to show your capability?
The “taadhing5” Neptune taught in ocean depth also
matures and turns ‘leisem jagoi’6;
starts tugging hard ‘ke-kre-ke mo-mo yangen samba siao siao’7;
with your hard tug vibrates all shores,
The home of livings built in with several kumjaas8,
converts into deaths’ dead homes.
Tsunami, for the fallen bodies of your rock,
starts a race to pick the corpses.
Satisfied on that recedes back calm to depth,
not mentioning the date to come again.

SHREEMA NINGOMBAN

Why talk of such things?  
I didn’t know the candle you lighted
Will last the night long
I didn’t sleep a wink
Lo, the morning is at the brink
I reopened the book on my desk
Why talk of things on ‘papers?
That will decay and ferment
We can talk of one and one
For this time this minute is for that belonging
Like the evanescent burn
Where the melting wax falls on my fingers
Like the calf that waywardly bum on our vehicle
Why to talk of things that happen in the distant vales
When the bones on your body in bed
Tells you the temperature of the day
Those incomplete verses I wrote for you
Those silent moments that flew from my fist rested beneath my chin?
Why to talks of munitions that falls like rain
Hails too fall, thunders too strike
Glances too kill it’s not only the lances
Why talk of hearth we see daily
On the highway above hills
When I cannot capture an ounce of its smoke
Why? Why to talk of such things?
Why talk of the end of such things
Or that things
When ebok could not recall
The last day when she went out to thongal
Before she had her last meal
Why talk of such things
When pupu save his slice of bread on his side table
For a tomorrow that never came for him

GIUSEPPE CONTE

From THE SEASONS

The Poet

I did not know what a poet was
when I used to drive chariots to war
and the horse Xantos talked me.
Like a comet, the youthful age

of Hector and Achilles has gone by:
I become nothing but a man:
now my soul looks for itself in the water
and in the fire, and in the thousand

families of flowers and trees,
in the heroes I am not,
in the garden where all the pain

of being born and dying il so light.
Maybe the poet is a man who holds inside
the cruel pity of each spring.

SALAH STÉTIÉ

THE BURNT OTHER SIDE
OF THE MOST PURE
(Translated by Heather Dohollau)
The rose of burning and the spirit's wind
Have bartered snow
Dove in the distance is this flake of light
Which becomes tear or dream
This side of day where she who sleeps
Awakes a bride to fire

And all these woods of long desire their backs to rain
Our shaping tears -
This country has in me its lamp of shade
In the heart's labyrinths a going to sleep
As a tear is child to another tear
At the end, the unheard of, a pure dragonfly
Escapes at the point of being, trembling there

RANJIT HOSKOTE

THE READING
for Charles Simic

I should have burnt my shadow on a wall
to remind them I’d been there
and a tracery of leaves for luck
or good measure

and walked out on them, on that dramatic note,
into a morning of rain and green distances
best left unmapped. Or reckoned by the roofs of houses
you could pick off with a pointed stick.

But all I did was read to them from a book
nailed to a table blackened by centuries of elbows,
smiling around at my circle of listeners,
dropping my glasses casually on the last page.

I knotted my muffler very carefully before walking out
and left an apple on the table at the end.

ALOK BHALLA 

IN JERUSALEM

Like the wolf after a kill
the victorious always feel
they are just
 
but how can the wolf know
what lurks in the forests ahead
 
the forests of the past
are lost in dark depths of memory

and so the wolf cannot know
there are other animals
who are swifter
with sharper claws bloodier teeth
and therefore more just

perhaps the poet knows
or the painter of miniature trees
with green parrots and ochre earth
that there are gardens with white houses
outside forests
where the eyes of wolves in the dazzling sunlight
are not a puzzle
and the owl's hoot even on moonless nights
is only a startled delight

but it’s also possible that
a woman of fine intelligence sees
in the clarity of mirrors
that the dark shimmering path
always and forever
turns back to the forest
leads back
only to the wolf.

ARJUN CHANDRAMOHAN BALI

Nargarh
eyes reduced to slits
a storm hovers on
a sentinel I stand
fingers spread
into the wind electric
sparks fly off their tips, rain
approaches Jaipur

MARIA VAN DAALEN

No one takes away from me my sorrow
or my talent to mould it.
No one jumps from the Acropolis
to save the country
or the language
or even the name of the flag.

*Translation: Renée Delhez (2009)

CARRIE RUDZINSKI

The Fifth One Who Walked Away
For the first boy I ever loved
I drove five hours across an ocean
of cornfields
to crawl into his heat.
Every time I left
he cut off one of my fingers
and kept it in a clear jar under his bed.
I wept the whole drive home –
a trail of blood
to find my way back.

The second boy
was just a distraction –
the hum of the television
and a pair of swollen eyes.
He gnawed at my wrists
like an ugly puppy –
I would have tasted good
even if I’d never spoken.

The third was a fleet of sailboats
spilling out across my tongue –
a pair callous palms –
desperation licking my teeth –
I was not so pretty
when he opened his eyes.

The fourth sewed my mouth shut
so I could only dance inside myself
with heavy shoes –
so I could pretend I loved him
in desperate gestures –
so I could unravel in his tired fists.

My hands have been fools.

They could not have been prepared
for you. I tucked them into your pockets,
filled their empty bellies
with your beautiful lies;
my strange American desert,
my warm endless night.

I did not know to fear the hands
that loved you before my own.

You stained her all over me –
left the windows open
as I slept in your bed,
washed me with a sponge doused in her spit every night.
I watched you slit off her skin
and hang it on my bones.
I could not open my mouth
for fear she would come spilling out.

Now, I have been silent for so long
my fingers are tiny blind worms
dancing in the night.
I tell them stories of our life
before the darkness –
but I do not know if they believe me.
I do not know if they recognize my own voice.

KAZIM ALI

Home

My father had a steel comb with which he would comb our hair.

After a bath the cold metal soothing against my scalp, his hand cupping
my chin.

My mother had a red pullover with a little yellow duck embroidered
on it and a pendant made from a gold Victoria coronation coin.

Which later, when we first moved to Buffalo, would be stolen from
the house.

The Sunn’i Muslims have a story in which the angels cast a dark mark
out of Prophet Mohammad’s heart, thus making him pure, though the
Shi’a reject this story, believing in his absolute innocence from birth.

Telling the famous Story of the Blanket in which the Prophet covers
himself with a Yemeni blanket for his afternoon rest. Joined under
the blanket first by his son-in-law Ali, then each of his grandchildren
Hassan and Hussain and finally by his daughter Bibi Fatima.

In Heaven Gabriel asks God about the five under the blanket and
God says, those are the five people whom I loved the most out of all
creation, and I made everything in the heavens and the earth for
their sake.

Gabriel, speaker on God’s behalf, whisperer to Prophets, asks God, can
I go down and be the sixth among them.

And God says, go down there and ask them. If they consent you may go
under the blanket and be the sixth among them.

Creation for the sake of Gabriel is retroactively granted when the group
under the blanket admits him to their company.

Is that me at the edge of the blanket asking to be allowed inside.

Asking the 800 hadith be canceled, all history re-ordered.

In Hyderabad I prayed every part of the day, climbed a thousand steps
to the site of Maula Ali’s pilgrimage.

I wanted to be those stairs, the hunger I felt, the river inside.

I learned to pronounce my daily prayers from transliterated English
in a book called “Know Your Islam,” dark blue with gold calligraphed
writing that made the English appear as if it were Arabic complete with
marks above and below the letters.

I didn’t learn the Arabic script until years later and never learned the
language itself.

God’s true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.

As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.

I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence
of stars.

When Abraham took Isaac up into the thicket his son did not know
where he was being led.

When his father bound him and took up the knife he was shocked.

And said, “Father, where is the ram?”

Though from Abraham’s perspective he was asked by God to sacrifice
his son and proved his love by taking up the knife.

Thinking to himself perhaps, Oh Ismail, Ismail, do I cut or do I burn.

I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath.

Fourth son of a fourth son, my father was afflicted as a child and
as was the custom in those days a new name was selected for him to
protect his health.

Still the feeling of his rough hand, gently cupping my cheek, dipping the
steel comb in water to comb my hair flat.

My hair was kept so short, combed flat when wet. I never knew my hair
was wavy until I was nearly twenty-two and never went outside with wet
and uncombed hair until I was twenty-eight.

At which point I realized my hair was curly.

My father’s hands have fortune-lines in them cut deeply and dramatic.

The day I left his house for the last time I asked him if I could hold his
hand before I left.

There are two different ways of going about this.

If you have known this for years why didn’t you ask for help, he
asked me.

Each time I left home, including the last time, my mother would hold a
Quran up for me to walk under. Once under, one would turn and kiss
the book.

There is no place in the Quran which requires acts of homosexuality to
be punishable by lashings and death.

Hadith or scripture. Scripture or rupture.

Should I travel out from under the blanket.

Comfort from a verse which also recurs: “Surely there are signs in this
for those of you who would reflect.”

Or the one hundred and four books of God. Of which only four are
known—Qur’an, Injeel, Tavrat, Zubuur.

There are a hundred others—Bhagavad-Gita, Lotus Sutra, Song of
Myself, the Gospel of Magdalene, Popul Vuh, the book of Black Buffalo
Woman—somewhere unrevealed as such.

Dear mother in the sky you could unbuckle the book and erase all the
annotations.

What I always remember about my childhood is my mother whispering
to me, telling me secrets, ideas, suggestions.

She named me when I moved in her while she was reading a calligraphy
of the Imam’s names. My name: translated my whole life for me as
Patience.

In India we climbed the steps of the Maula Ali mountain to the top,
thirsting for what.

My mother had stayed behind in the house, unable to go on pilgrimage.
She had told me the reason why.

Being in a state considered unacceptable for prayers or pilgrimages.

I asked if she would want more children and she told me the name she
would give a new son.

I always attribute the fact that they did not, though my eldest sister’s first
son was given the same name she whispered to me that afternoon, to my
telling of her secret to my sisters when we were climbing the stairs.

It is the one betrayal of her—perhaps meaningless—that I have never
forgiven myself.

There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make.

You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God
will still welcome you.

My name is Kazim. Which means patience. I know how to wait.

Reprinted from Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities, by Kazim Ali, Wesleyan University Press, © 2009.

ANDY JACKSON

The bike itself

The black bike someone left, locked up,
is daily deconstructed by theft.  With each
walk past, you think – I could do with that,
a simplification, where what's lost isn't up to me. 
Without knowing it, this is Coburg's version
of a zen koan – where has the bike itself gone? 
A mynah swoops and clips a pigeon, a plastic bag
becomes a flag on a fig-tree and a young man
stares into his laptop's dim, flickering screen.
Now you can't walk past the half-demolished
house – no roof or walls, only an empty frame
surrounding a fireplace.  Memories not even
lavender-patterned wallpaper can hold onto
lift into the sky, like pollen or dust in reverse.

K. SRILATA

Arriving Shortly
When amma came
to New York city,
she wore unfashionably cut
salwar kurtas,
mostly in beige,
so as to blend in,
her body
a puzzle that was missing a piece -
the many sarees
she had left behind:
that peacock blue
Kanjeevaram,
that nondescript nylon in which she had raised
and survived me,
the stiff chikan saree
that had once held her up at work.

When amma came to
New York city,
an Indian friend
who swore by black
and leather,
remarked in a  stage whisper,
                                                                                                                                                                               

“This is New York, you know –
not Madras.
Does she realise?”

Ten years later,
transiting through L.A airport
I find amma
all over again
in the uncles and aunties
who shuffle past the Air India counter
in their uneasily worn, unisex Bata sneakers,
suddenly brown in a white space,
louder than ever in their linguistic unease
as they look for quarters and payphones.
I catch the edge of amma’s saree
sticking out
like a malnourished fox’s tail
from underneath
some other woman’s sweater
meant really for Madras’ gentle Decembers.

AFTAB SETH

 Pillars of my Landscape
  Pillars of my landscape.
  Urge and nudge me back
   slowly to pain.

   Now bursting burnished bronze,
   ringed with ravaged red,
   slow torment as
   now insinuating
    now thrusting
    mute memory sharpened.
    Supine wonders
    curled in grotesque twisted glory,
    Pillars of my landscape;
    warped willows droop
    drenched in brackish backwaters,
    pencil sharp
    leaden weight,
    Pillars of my landscape
    there is no escape.