And finally, the bestest, beautifullest, most splendid news of all. My very own poetry book, A Witch Like You, equal to the length of two usual poetry books, has been accepted by feminist press, Girls on Key Poetry, Australia, and is scheduled for an April 2021 release. Woohoo!! <3 <3 <3
Keep watching this space for more good news, cos I'm telling ya, stuff will be happening very, very soon!
So this old poem, written and posted on this blog earlier during my MPhil days, won a prize! Beyond the panorama, a journal operating from Bangalore, had a poetry competition on 'Lights' on the occasion of Diali, the fstival of lights, and this little poem won a prize for it!! I got a poetry books as a prize, along with a cloth stationery pouch and a handwritten note!
See the website here
This Amavasya night
This glow of candles
This lit-up darkness
Makes me believe.
Tracing your name
In smoke-trails with the phuljhadi
Makes me believe.
Green-yellow lights wind snakily in the lawn
Up-vine-down-trellis, strangely eerie
The burning flame in me grows stronger
Creating magic with quicksilver heat
the flame of my belief in you.
This is the flame which lights me regardless
All doubts scatter in surrounding darkness
Rangoli patterns my fingers etch draw life
From this flame which makes
This smoke-strewn, flame-strewn
Night holy.
I am the blue of the flame
Beyond touch, beyond reach.
Written by Shruti Sareen
So three more poems in Hakara, the journal edited by Ashutosh Potdar and Noopur Desai from Mumbai-Pune. The poems are- 'Frankenstein', 'The All Consuming Question', and, 'My Anger is Rising Like the Brahmaputra'. Accompanying the poems is an illustration / painting by my very own friend, Abhipsa Chakraborty!
My Anger is Rising Like the Brahmaputra
My anger is rising like the swelling Brahmaputra in Assam
Flooding its banks, drowning, destroying everything in sight
My anger is like the bloody sunset on the river
Glorious, ferocious, burning, sinking only to rise again
Nature’s fury is as merciless as man’s against nature.
My anger is rising like the swelling Brahmaputra in Assam
Anger at politicians touring luxury Assamese resorts
While commoners, sighing dying, make another trip, Pay lives as cost
Angry that those with fake histories and forged marksheets
Serve protesting Miya poets with chargesheets
Those with fake qualifications and degrees
Expect the precarious poor to produce proof for NRC
Angry that parents kill their own children
For the honour of a girl or an inter caste union
Angry that sewers reveal dead Dalit body parts
We have reached the moon but not their hearts
Once, we had unity in diversity
Today, hearts divided, only relics of unity
My anger is rising like the swelling Brahmaputra in Assam
Temples of solid gold, opulent towers, masterpieces
Farmers dying, children starving, death in the gutter, death in the penis
Angry that little children die crying for food
that rapists go scot free and girls are abused
Angry that workers are humiliated with cruelty
When corporates are culprits, criminals with impunity
Angry that lakhs of mangroves are cut down
For a new metro station, or a tinsel town
Angry that we learnt of lynchings from Alice Walker
Today’s children must cry “Oh no! Not another!”
Angry that cows and people alike are used as pawns
For evil machinations with no sign of a dawn
My anger is rising like the swelling Brahmaputra in Assam
With the force of Kerala’s floods, Chennai’s tsunami and Odisha’sFani
Like a dancing serpent raising his hood
As my anger reaches epic proportions
This poem remains castrated, impotent, no promise of fruition
***
The All Consuming Question
So let’s settle this finally.
The all consuming question
as vital as the difference
Between breath and death: do you
Like me or dislike me? The gravity
of this may escape you, but consider
the weightiness of a world built and
a world destroyed, a life born
and a life broken. My heart
speaks two separate truths,
one immediate, the other analytic.
The immediate says- you fool!
She stays away from you, cannot
See you nor speak to you, of course
She dislikes you, it is clear and simple.
Thus saying, the immediate proceeds
To be deeply jealous, to break itself
With its own immediacy, the haunting
Terror that you like her and her and her
And her and him and all of them
Whereas you choose to banish me to exile.
The immediate is a candle which burns itself
Out and dies. The immediate lands itself
In deep depression.It wants to become you
In order to desperately clutch at you. But that
Path is murky and dirty and all messed up.
The analytic tries to ponder. It wants to revise
The earlier notion that you are a sadist,
That you get pleasure out of
hurting me. The analytic
Says that you do this to save yourself,
Not to punish me, just as I
did not mean to cause you injury.
The analytic says that you have been
Patient and forebearing for a long,
Long time. The analytic says that silence
Need not necessarily be war. It could
Be peace too. The analytic remembers
That you did not tell them the secret
Between me and you. It recollects
The times when you looked at me
In the distance, even while surrounded
By them. How you even smiled, though I
Was not meant to see. How you refrained
From hurting me back in return all those times.
Some say this is forgiveness: not hurting the
One who hurt you back in revenge.That you
Are there with me in spirit, that I need not
Desperately clutch at straws in panic.
I like to believe the analytic
Even as the immediate runs
After me lashing out at my heels,
Baying for my blood, spreading terror
Saying the analytic is a lie.
The all consuming question will never
Hear an answer, the battle between
The immediate and the analytic rages on
Though the analytic still nurses hopes
Of faraway, distant dawn.
***
Frankenstein
Your fearful eyes
pierce a hole in my heart.
the red mess oozes out
There is paucity of oxygen.
I struggle to breathe
The air is suddenly cold.
Too cold. Sadness has replaced oxygen.
My heart fills with deep grief which expands,
pushing against auricular and ventricular walls,
Am I Frankenstein, or the monster?
Do you see me as such?
Does fear indicate aversion?
That is the primal question of my life.
An affirmative answer could lead to cardiac arrest.
The memory of you, the idea of you
is my pacemaker now.
You are also the womb, giving primal womb nurture
But I have been selfish. I am astounded
At your extreme fear.
The Creature that Frankenstein created
Brought him grief, guilt and finally death.
That is the monster that chases me.
The revenge of the monster on F.
Long ago, you compared it to Tom and Jerry.
Today I liken it to Frankenstein. We have come so far.
I rehearse the act of shattering and breaking with grief
over and over again. I love you.
***
So Samyukta Poetry had a queer themed issue in June 2020 (my birth month!), so a couple of poems got featured there. As well as a youtube video--- my very first-- WOW!!
A link to the journal issue here and to the youtube video here
Hair
She told me you cut those long black tresses
suli in Axomiya, falling to your waist since a time
before I can remember. She showed me a picture
of you with new frizzy hair.
I wish I could have collected your beautiful fallen hair
I wish I could have preserved a piece of you
which you no longer wanted..
I wonder how your juda stick will feel from disuse and neglect now
Will you discard it, throw it away?
Will you keep your hair short now, send out short hair pictures?
Or let it grow long again?
My hair is emotion for me.
I caress it, twirl it, fiddle with it constantly
When I am upset. You are the only person
Who could make me cut it. On an impulse,
I want to cut my hair to be like you.
To keep you in me. To forsake the hair
Instead of forsaking you. Hair is precious,
But you are priceless. But that would
Be silly. I will preserve the old you for a while longer
My long black waist length tresses like yours
Tied up with a stick the way yours used to be,
Can I keep my hair and keep you too, I wonder?
Someday I will cut my hair like you
(Only you can make me do it).
Some of my hair turned white with PhD anxiety.
Sometimes, when macabre and gloomy, I think of killing
Myself, and presenting all my long cut-hair to you as proof.
I will cut my hair short when it’s mostly white
Like yours, or maybe like your sister’s
I will prance around with hair, blue, purple and green.
So my hair is growing ripe and white and I am about to turn 32
You were 32 when I met you first. It’s been fourteen whole years.
“You dress just like your mother”, you said. “Why?”
I was flummoxed.
I had never thought I dressed like my mother
I had hardly thought about the way I dressed at all.
I wore whatever people gave me
I privileged the inner over the exterior
I thought fancy clothes as being frivolous
I did not know that I repeated the age-old privileging
of mind over body, man over woman, spiritual over physical
You taught me how to own my body
To play with it, experiment
the purpose of dressing is to feel beautiful
not only to look
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
And my physique was similar to yours
The dark skin, the long face, the lean frame, and the long black rippled hair
So as I darkened my eyes, put up my hair, slipped in danglers,
pierced navel and nose and inked a tattoo like you,
Truthfully the most beautiful woman I have ever seen
I started to fall in love with the image I saw in the mirror
My body, and the way I adorned it, owned it
Even when thoughts and emotions were in disarray
Instead of dressing like my mother, I started dressing like you
If my mother birthed my body, so equally did you.
Narrow Road Journal had a special issue called 'A New World' edited by Smeetha Bhoumik. Here's the poem ''In the Woods' which I wrote for it!
In the Woods (a ghazal)
Beside the lake, beneath the trees in the woods
Murmuring humming buzzing bees in the woods
No daffodils, but lantana- red orange yellow pink
Music, songs and love float on a breeze in the woods
Children run jump dance and play in joy
No school rules, no school fees in the woods
The birds know no caste and the deer no politics
Human ideas of money power privilege freeze in the
woods
There’s no lies, malice, selfish greed in the forest
No oil pollution petrol diesel grease in the woods
A big bright rainbow hangs splendid in the sky
Across the field, a flock of geese in the woods
No dairy cows are traumatised beyond horror
Because nobody eats cheese in the woods.
Hues of orange pink purple blue red green
Peacocks and their mates tease in the woods.
The sun sets like a jewel, beyond the hill
The world is so beautiful, oh jeez, in the woods
Birds chirp and twitter, rabbits and squirrels hop
Life gets a new lease in the woods
Can we leave the muck and rot, create a new world
Won’t you come and live, says Shruti, please, in the
woods?
So this beloved poem 'Baidew', which is one of my favouritest, was published in the Harper Collins anthology of Queer Poetry from South Asia edited by Aditi Angiras and Akhil Katyal, The World Belongs To Us, wow!! An honour and a privilege. Incidentally, Aditi and Akhil are both friends.
Baidew
You
said I remind you of your sister
When
she was very young.
Sometimes
I think I could have been
Your
littlest sister. Could have played
With
you, read with you and
Grown
up with you.
Sometimes
I think I could have been Axomiya
I look
at your sister, she is like you
But not
a mirror image. Sometimes I think
I could
be her. I could be her sister too. You, her,
And me
too. I could sister-love you, sister-look-up-to-you
And
sister-tease you then.
I could
take that as fundamental fact
Before
I took on the world.
Sometimes
I think I could have
Called
you Baidew.
These two were especially written for, and published in, a food poems print anthology called Quesadilla and other food poems edited by Somrita Urni Ganguly, who's also a friend, so cheers to her-- yay!!
Learning Balance Through Food
Salt is an essential requirement in food.
So heap it up. No, not so much as to become
too much! You are cooking vegetables, not salt, you see.
Salt is what you call a spice, or a condiment.
It can make you, or it can break you. That’s the thing with salt.
And the thing with hot crackling spluttering oil too. And with
sugar.
And with a zillion other things. Heck, it’s the thing with cooking
itself.
How did our ancestors live without fire
Cooking is vital but too much only leaves you with charred
remains.
So how much do you need of a good thing
Are you making gobhi-aloo or aloo-gobhi?
Do you want to balance the green with red and yellow bell peppers?
What mix of sociology, history and poetry in a literature PhD?
How many poets is too many poets? You need to decide.
Of course you may have milky sugary tea. I prefer it without
Then there are those who leave the tea leaves out of the tea and make it
herbal
What proportion vodka in a glass of orange juice? Or vice versa.
As a Facebook meme said, a balanced diet is red wine with white, milk
chocolate with dark
Or let’s take rasgullasgulabjamunsladdoos and mithais.
They are first and foremost sweets, Madame.
But some like my mother like their sweets less-sweet.
Or those like my taste-buds who mature with age
Leaving childish chocoholism and cottage cheese cravings behind
You may be at the political centre, sir. I, surely left of centre
But fundamental extremes only bind us in circles of continuum
And next time you obsess, Asperger’s like (note to self)
over an unironed crease or some bit of dirt
An incomplete footnote or an excluded poet
Unbounded optimism-pessimism, emotion-reason, kindness-firmness
And perhaps even the next time you exercise militant vegetarianism to
spare those poor animals
(So exercise it yes, but decide how much salt, what kind of salt)
Maybe, just maybe remember (I need to learn but so do you)
that although salt is an extremely important ingredient in
cooking,
And must certainly never be overlooked
Salt must still be used in proportion.
Conveying love through serving food
offerings upon heaped offerings,
platefuls
is common in a culture which shies away
from expressing love in other ways.
Taste also as a marker of love is a
common
motif in poetry. Tasting tea together,
wine together, cooking together, tasting
the beloved’s lips, nose, skin, eating
the desired one. Only, I make love
to you differently. Making love in
absentia.
I try to connect with you whom I yearn
for
by connecting with your culture.
Axomiya food. In my case, Axomiya
everything.
But this poem is about food.
The mashed aloo pitika. The bamboo
shoots I love.
Dried. Or pickled. Or fried. Bamboo
shoots are bamboo shoots.
The khobong raspberry tea. So many
myriad teas.
The laishak. I haven’t tasted the other
green leafies. The temulpaan which
burned my throat,
I had so much. The big bright yellow
nemus.
The brown Kumool chawal which swells in
water.
The curd with rice flakes and jaggery.
The payesh.
And sweet rice pithas. Narikollaru. The
tangy dal
with the outenga in it. Did you grow up
eating these?
You wrote poetry and prose about
consuming home
through food. I so want to eat all of
that.
I have very limited experience. I would
anyway
Not have the maasortenga, the duck, the
pork, the bacon.
Forever a divide between you and me. How
does he make
love to you, not knowing how these feel
and taste
upon your tongue. He has never eaten,
never will.
How does he make love to you, not
knowing that?
In absentia, I eat the bhogalichowmein
(like I ate
with you once, remember? Aloo paranthas,
popcorn,
chowmein – not axomiya). I try to adopt
Axom land
I try to eat and dream my way back to you.
Hello folks,
so these three poems got published in a print anthology called Culture Cult in the 'Nocturne' issue edited by Jay Chakravarti in September last year. Here you go!
Exile : An Ode to My
Happy Place
It is a wound, ceaselessly burning, that no
medicine can ever heal.
You cannot speak about it in the first person.
I tried. I couldn’t.
It is in my bloodstream. It is in my silences
when I look away. It is in my hot secret tears. It is rarely in my speech.
Sometimes I try to distance it while speaking,
jocularly, like a face painted masked clown at the circus
Because how else do I speak that which is too
intimate for speech
That with which my pulse and heartbeat throbs
night and day
That which is tattooed on my heart skin soul
with indelible ink
That which I live in my dreams when I cannot
in reality
That which is mine, with me always, no matter
how far away I am from it
That which I always hold magical memories
of,
No matter how bitter the hurt, how devastating
the grief
O beautiful wondrous place, you are precious,
you are loved
You are mine, you are forever
home.
Grief
It is a
thin, translucent lining
Wrapping
itself around various
Organs.
It forms the inner lining
Of the
gut, of the colon, it covers
The
limbs and the breasts. It thickens
Around
the heart like a protecting wall.
At the
corners of the eyes, it dissolves
Into
tear drops. It pains at the joints,
like
rheumatism. It is delicate
as
spiderweb, and is easily perforated.
Sword-words
are fatal. Dealt with such weapons
It
shudders, shakes and violently trembles
Threatening
to collapse and turn you into
Non-being.
Even pin-prick words and
Hasty clumsy
words can be fatal.
The
membrane is fragile, and needs
Special
care in a hospital. Rough and rude
Knocks
produce agitations. The membrane
Of
grief is tired of being perforated.
It
wants a sterilized space to recuperate.
The
membrane will become a wall.
The
membrane will not allow
Perforations.
The membrane
Will
close into itself like a field
That
lies fallow. The membrane will stop
Trying
to interact with beings
In
outer space. The membrane
Will
preserve itself like pickle or jelly.
It will
learn (regardless of the pain) the art
Of
wearing masks, which come undone
Only in
solitude.
My anger is rising like the
swelling Brahmaputra in Assam
Flooding its banks,
drowning, destroying everything in sight
My anger is like the bloody
sunset on the river
Glorious, ferocious,
burning, sinking only to rise again
Nature’s fury is as
merciless as man’s against nature.
My anger is rising like the
swelling Brahmaputra in Assam
Anger at politicians
touring luxury Assamese resorts
While commoners, sighing
dying, make another trip, Pay lives as cost
Angry that those with fake
histories and forged marksheets
Serve protesting Miya poets
with chargesheets
Those with fake
qualifications and degrees
Expect the precarious poor
to produce proof for NRC
Angry that parents kill
their own children
For the honour of a girl or
an inter caste union
Angry that sewers reveal
dead Dalit body parts
We have reached the moon but
not their hearts
Once, we had unity in
diversity
Today, hearts divided, only
relics of unity
My anger is rising like the
swelling Brahmaputra in Assam
Temples of solid gold,
opulent towers, masterpieces
Farmers dying, children
starving, death in the gutter, death in the penis
Angry that little children
die crying for food
that rapists go scot free
and girls are abused
Angry that workers are
humiliated with cruelty
When corporates are
culprits, criminals with impunity
Angry that lakhs of
mangroves are cut down
For a new metro station, or
a tinsel town
Angry that we learnt of
lynchings from Alice Walker
Today’s children must cry
“Oh no! Not another!”
Angry that cows and people
alike are used as pawns
For evil machinations with
no sign of a dawn
My anger is rising like the
swelling Brahmaputra in Assam
With the force of Kerala’s
floods, Chennai’s tsunami and Odisha’sFani
Like a dancing serpent
raising his hood
As my anger reaches epic
proportions
This poem remains
castrated, impotent, no promise of fruition
