Commemorating Human Rights Day, 2019 with a poem and an extempore by Parnab Mukherjee.
CYCLE OF FOLIAGE POEMS
OPENING CHORUS
You can hear the whistle blow
hundred
thousand
miles
away from home
becomes
the fragrance of juin,
jaba
Kanakchampa,
Gulmohar,
Casurina
Always.
SOLO FOR TWO VOICES
Look over my shoulder
peep out
Between meadows
turning into Special Economic Zones
and orange slag skies
You’ll find a
dry tear
baby’s lament
a cicada’s call
or
the birth
of a new lilac.
POEM ZERO
To gently
The aadhar
Of all the aadhar cards
POEM INDETERMINATE
Can a tree become a poem
Or muted into a verse
Can a poem become a tree-
Shape shifts –
Post flower generation
Hashtag posts
Democracy
Dance of democracy
On our dressing table
Or all hearts
Have a tree
That is a poem
A banyan.
POEM 1
For all that is gone
And will go
For all that is past and remains
nostalgia
For all that is forward and races past
For all the fors (sic)
Fox trots, justification, notifications
And postponed wishfulness
For all that is transient,
semi-permanent,
temporary
ephemeral
ethereal, corporeal
For these todays
tomorrows,
past participates,
gerunds,
future perfect
traversed
roads
For all that and more
Plant a pomegranate tree!
POEM 2
When do metaphors shift
why do they move
in a snail’s pace
from here to there
Why do they remain lacklustre in
all its glory
and glorious in its
most mundane
Is the shortest distance between
the rose and the
muzzle
lie
between the fallen chinar
leaf
and the hangul’s walk towards it
Between
now and then
Between
in betweens
muscles swell up
muscles sag
Plant a cherry tree!
POEM 3
I know the
colour of my conversations,
magenta, ochre, deeply green, Prussian blue
I know the frame
that I wear in the eyes
do not reflect,
refract my idea
of passive resistance
I know deep
down in that
despair
disbelief
inspire
getting up
There is the
ever contracting arch
of concern
Do not call me
to hear spinning webs
of fairy tales
Instead plant a chinar!
POEM 4
Books
Manuscripts
Frayed Edges
Fading yellow pages,
rusty with time
One syllable sticks to another to complete
a word
One letter missing
fades away the smell
One missing letter
One missing alphabet
One comma there
Out there, there
One semi- colon stuck in the gut
You don’t know
how time could
fly between the
creases of the bed sheets
or soaked in the handkerchief..
lies the passion
of labour, lust, looking away, looking within
You dig into
your excess,
abscess,
bylanes
drain pipes,
flowing in their
veins
is
all that is
REM
NON-REM
slow wave
deep wave
sutures
Infarct
In fact,
the time is
ripe to plant a moulsari!
POEM 5
Roots wind up
like poems as the
tree bends…
Flakes wind up
like haikus as
the pencil is sharpened.
In a country
that has stopped writing letters to
each other.
You only see
storehouses of empty envelopes
godowns of postcards,
emptied ink bottles
letters in duress
alphabets under a perfect curfew
And stray punctuation
marks and
figures of speech
all looking
for an orchard to rest
Under the shade of banyan!
POEM 6
Dehydrated?
Drink a salt
sweet balanced
water
Vitamin B12 or D
Deeply felt shingles?
Pin and needles
squeezing and dizzy,
wheezy,
sit down.
sit up
be supine
under the disintegrating archive
of times
brick by brick
mason by mason
stone by stone
wood by wood
flooring by flooring
the entire edifice
becomes a castle
without soul!
Give it light!
Plant an Oleander!
POEM 7
Winter
is a little far
Extended summer
Prepaid monsoon
Never to arrive spring
The dried
leaves of yesterday
Tomorrow’s fences
Have all conspired
To stop the liberetto
From becoming an opera
Before the cue sheet turns into a score
Plant an oak!
Standing tall in a world that is too short.
POEM 8
Just a rhododendron tree
Would have turned
this lacklustre
ultra-designer
courtyard into
a flexible
shape-shifting
inverse
converse
obverse
space into a
breathing space
for theatre performance
Bonus: the play
would get a smell
As it is performed.
POEM 9
If you
care to look,
gaze, linger
across all that
is simply
called passe,
ingenuine
sanguine
unfixed,
normal
You will notice that
the mucus
the polyp
the migraine
the heady smell
the claustrophobia
all gets into the skin
Cure: Pick up
a jasmine, smell
inhale and exhale!
POEM 10
Tomorrow’s poem shall not
repeat today’s
lines, phrases
or even the
line-break between
the sentences
but tomorrow’s
poem will
remain indebted
to the
redness of
the past, present
and future
for the poem
will not be loose
the lives will not be naïve,
they shall grow into a rose.
POEM 11
Just this time
you have to
allow the
deodar to
leap out of the
sidewalk
and populate
our senses,
our ambience
our disappearing trees,
our seed, weed, ferns, flora
our bio degradable
our bio-degradability
our apologies to ecology
to be
held accountable
as a promissory note
Let Deodars rise
tall, swift
and become
the wand of
our tweaked todays.
POEM 12
A dozen
Dahlias
Would have turned
Your hair into
A river of smells
POEM 13
All letting go(s)
All goodbyes
All ushering in
All sunrise
Clamour
All celebrations
Bouts of laughter
All shaking up
All shaking through
All fumigated
All solstice
All excess
All shadows
All reversal
All brightly lit objectifications
All looking for
All upsides, downsides
All onwards
Progressive
All evenings, dust, journeys
All equinoxes
All can begin
With a crisp petal
of a palash
that fires the imagination of an autumn
POEM 14
Spot the light
Form circle
Unrelenting
The ever increasing orb
All falls on that
hyacinth- memories
Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice,
Rodney King, Jamil Robertson
Black lives always matter
Even without a hashtag.
POEM 15
You vow
row
the boat
across green
of desire
to another shore
only to realize
that a little more has to be covered
actually,
a lot more
from where you started
to the island
which houses a baobab.
POEM 16
You have to tell me
how the sunflowers
leapt out of Van Gogh’s painting
and for some seconds
rested on your table
only to go back to the painting again.
POEM 17
Transfixed
Look
Iris
Or
Irises in
the field
Najeeb, come back home.
POEM 18
Lillain,
Lisa,
Lal Salaam
Lute
Living
Luther
Lijjat
Lothario
Lysander
Lice, loss
Liberation
Liverpool
Laxative
Laughter
Lesotho
Lumding
A lily in water
A water lily
POEM INDETERMINATE
Ferguson,
You’ve got to tell me
How black lives get reduced to
Solidarity hashtags
And not into
consciousness
POEM ZERO
To be loved
Is it present continuous?
Or future perfect?
POST SCRIPT-
Krishnachura
Ashwath
Bel
The names
ring a bell
inside corridors of
vernacular memory.
Memory means
memory signs
memory montage
memory morphs
into a fresh
Radhachura flowers
towards the horizon
towards
the faint embers
of reds, suffused
with saffron
as a sunset
spreads onto the water.
You can see
the birth of a new lilac
I can rediscover
What story telling
sermon
talks
analysis
mean to you
and then ask
yourself
Is there a democracy?
SOLO FOR ONE VOICE
Thorn
edgy
sharp
resilient
waves that fall back
one after the other,
yet the boulevard
holds onto the
cactus plant
or
in the shanties
across budge budge
railway line-
there is still
the struggling sign of hope
in the form
of a frangipani.
FINAL CHORUS-
Can you jump
three sentences
Trek your way across
two unevenly spaced out paragraphs
crawl your way
across a dangerous apostrophe
that threatens
singulars and plurals
and
make your way through
a thicket of similes
to reach a point of
high on nadir.
Nevertheless,
waiting for you is a blue lotus
or
heightened consciousness
or
a low down.
In Difference by Parnab Mukherjee
Culture Monks 