Soon after the 1947 Dogra Raj downfall, a Kashmiri versifier writing misery and mutiny faded away in the prime of her youth as if she never existed until Mountain Inkโs Meher Qadri unearthed the poetโs buried legacy with a questionโโIs she the first uncrowned poetess of Kashmir?โ At the cusp of World War-II in 1938,…
Dear Nemesis? Dear Arch-enemy? Poet? Disaster? Dear Poet- the one who is worth two poets after death – deader the better. -April 14th, 2020 Dear dead Poet, Poets love to romance with suicide, the idea of suicide- not the action. They invent themselves in this conjecture. They are in a constant state of anticipation…
Originally an Arabic verse form dealing with loss and romantic love, medieval Persian poets embraced the ghazal, eventually making it their own. Consisting of syntactically and grammatically complete couplets, the form also has an intricate rhyme scheme. Each couplet ends on the same word or phrase (the radif), and is preceded by the coupletโs rhyming…
Sri Aurobindo, in his seminal essay The Future of Poetry, observes that “Truth of poetry is not truth of philosophy or truth of science or truth of religion only because it is another way of self-expression of infinite Truth so distinct that it appears to give quite another face of things and reveal quite another…
Today, I write to you from a faraway land I don’t know when my words will reach you, If you’ll get to read my letters or my songs. I hear rumours of men marching towards your city Men with guns and laathis and power; Power that controls us, tortures us, leaves us powerless in our…
The Murderer and the Murdered I have never found it in my heart,to clean my room.I like it muddy and untidyโthe kind of chaos, that accompaniesa frantic search for the passport,just before leaving for the airport. A madness walking naked,turning my walls into New York Subways,where trains leave from one city to anothertravelling through holes…
Gushes to the lips, as an orison, a wish of mine As does the candle, Allah, may so my life shine! May l conduce to the world free of ignorance! May every place gets lightened with my brilliance! So much l subserve to my nation’s prosperity, As much as a flower does to its bed’s…
These tarnished rays, this night-smudged lightThis is not that Dawn for which, ravished with freedom,We had set out in sheer longing,So sure that somewhere in its desert the sky harbouredA final haven for the stars, and we would find it.We had no doubt that night’s vagrant wave would stray towards the shore,That the heart rocked…
Regret with a cold gush of fright arrives: Autumn, suddenly, with all its might arrives! Not often: but every-time it rains all night; At dawn, a letter (you could never write) arrives. You may order every clock to turn back on Time But the Tomorrow, however, despite arrives. At last, the wait will be over…
I donโt dream aboutthe divine spirits of revolutionabout ghosts in the shapesof struggles, protestsand fightsblood and bombs. I donโt dream abouta place whererain is born to weave the rainbowswhere from there is no exileno head is bowedno sinsno sorrow. where every griefeach sufferingin silencemake up slogans. Azadi. Azadi. Azadi I donโt dream aboutan isolated, lonely…