By Gopal Lahiri
Tag: Poetry
By Gabriel Rosenstock
India!
Does the goddess Saraswati smile
When you imprison your poets
When, Covid-stricken, they hallucinate
Sitting in a puddle of urine?
By Ajanta Paul
“An Introduction” is a poem which rewrites itself in the discourse of the present age, both with regard to the current patriarchal resurgence of chauvinist tendencies and its effect on female agency as also in the use of the English language in globalized times.
By Rini Bhattacharya
I spell out whispering love hymns
For all these dead love-couples.
Their mating rituals are complete
The channel rings the bell of joy.
By Sonali Pattnaik
can you hear thousands chanting,
as they march hand in hand,
‘not in my name’, ‘not in my name.’
By Babra Shafiqi
No one attends the stale fly’s last rites,
No one mourns like clouds, their thundering sobs
Or the drops of tap water shaped as a noose
By Syed Aamir Sharief Qadri
The people here are not authorized to talk loud
They usually talk in hints, signs and gestures.
By Mitali Chakravarty
Can a land be unfound?
Can History be unwound?
Can Time be redeemed?
By Sonnet Mondal
The city leans over the Yamuna
to clean its wounds.
By Aafiya Siddiqui
Now I envy the lamenting pens
And pheonix tears of mourning eyes
For mine have dried
Turning the fissure of heart
into deep voids.
By Mitali Chakravarty
Why perpetrate borders drenched in blood
while Lalon only sings of Humanity and Love?
By Michael R. Burch
At last, done with learning, I stumbled
to a well where the waters seemed sweet:
the mirage of American “justice.”
There I wept a real sea, in defeat.
By Mubashir Karim
Sometimes,
Clarity is not what one wishes for –
Voice-breaks are needed to overwrite
The beginnings of love affairs
The-strangers-yet-to-meet kind of narratives
Over the everyday details.
By Mosarrap H Khan
Kirti Sengupta, Anu Majumdar and Dustin Pickering’s Hibiscus: Poems that heal and empower encapsulates the role and duty of a poet in times of pandemic in much the same way Pushkin imagined doing it: by empowering us to think beyond death.
By Amrita Sharma
I wrote our names upon each rock,
Of luminous screens and flashing slates,
In blacks and whites and thousand fonts,
That morphed along a tenuous carve.
By Umang Kumar
This is how it kills, George
like a knee on the neck
bearing down
to crush you
constricting breath
By Sekhar Banerjee
Calcutta is hermaphrodite like a red hibiscus
or a tomato or pumpkin or a horse chestnut
By Moinak Dutta
So they look around
Like a stupefied lot,
Totally clueless.
By Anjana Ramanathan
For all I have are my feet,
I go, where they go,
If I die on the way,
We have together reached paradise.
Cafe Dissensus Everyday 