Inaugural Issue

FROM THE DESK OF ETHOS LITERARY JOURNAL

We are proud to launch Poetry India: Contemporary Poetry in English and Translation, a project that aims at curating poetry by Indian poets or poets of Indian origin. Although India claims to be the world's second-largest English-speaking country, according to the 2011 Census,...

I have seen these lines being used in love letters. I know how dear these lines are to the young lovers, in particular. But whenever I read these lines, I feel that I hear the voice of poetry. Poetry, as if, whispers in the ears of a poet, words which are intimate, seductive and smell of the aroma of new birth.

Lips on lips, the gaze towards nothingness
Would it matter delving in these wrong verse business?
Nothingness is the Scorpio moon-sign, the lips quite unaware
Hair waving in the air, tight jeans, oh the desperate lover
Imprinting the lipstick mark, those lips keep quivering
Passion boils up, passion spills over...

The most abstract mountain
Out there, amidst the clouds
Is in fact the most grounded,
the most concrete
Just like my sorrow that is
masked with joyful dancing...

A dry land seeking liberty
to get drenched wonders
about the quiet after this storm.
The roads are familiar to it. 
The smell of the air isn't.
The trees no longer liaise...

When a person crosses the bar,
becomes a sinner.
In the dark evening, the road I am walking on
is full of dirt.
The evergreen forest gets burnt
when there is no love...

I stay on the seventeenth floor.
The moon can see my solitude.
But I cannot touch her sky.
I can see the sea below.
Inside it too there is a sky.
Behind me is a sea of slums...

Always
my sister will repeat in anger
what Amma says more subtly: that I am to blame
for all that goes wrong
in the bedroom.
Everyday, in the bedroom...

Aliens are seated in the metro rail.
With their eyes glued to their smartphones,
and their headphones plugged into their ears, 
they have shut out the earth's reality around them.
Their faces are robotic and restless, being totally
commanded by the signals of the virtual world...

Dawn is being swept away down melody’s stream.
Birds, tender leaves, grasses and pebbles
sing in response.
From far, far away, you, Mira Bai, are walking slowly
towards us with your heart-wrenched
devotional Brajabuli song steeped in...

So, the field wasn’t even there,
crossing which, all those days,
we had gone to that village.
My own people stayed in that village
When we went there,
carrying umbrella of sunshine or rain,...

Hanging between two towers –
a swimming pool clasped
within the Infinity Loop –
floating web - a wire mesh
called the cloud – Deya –
causes architectural shivers..