July 2024 Issue

As we dedicate the third edition of Poetry India to Surjit Patar whom we lost a few months ago, we remember this poem of his. A poem like this could only be written by a Surjit Patar who never compromised with his sword that looked like a pen, who proved that political poetry could be gracefully lyrical

Punjab has been a difficult region.To speak in the language of this volatile region is an ordeal, a death-defying act. The poets of Punjab cannot afford to be poets alone, they have the cultural obligation to speak for its restless people in their idiom and ideology. Poetry, popularity and politics constitute

The fever takes refuge in us.
It oversleeps to the warmness
and builds a footbridge to the alien world.
Our ancestors' spirits struggle
to get rid of the wilderness
that had thrived within their tissues.

My great grandmother stopped each day
at the St Alphonsa shrine
on Brodie’s Road in Madras.
Just in case
saints were a bit like
local goddesses–

Like a double edged sword
it cut me.
Nostalgia and nightmare
shaking hands.
Tears closeted in time
and...

Now men will come from the shadows like rabbits.
Wind is blowing.
Cold wind grabs our ears and the edges of memory.
I remember your white fingers.
It was a sacrilege to send you back to your own shadows.

Peasants stay up the whole night, and from the stalks of paddy separate paddy and birds from each other. In the morning, someone’s storehouse fills up with bags of paddy. And the birds flutter around looking for beak-sized portions of darkness.

Once in my childhood in this small town
superlative trees towered high above
covering the burning sun
spreading cool shadows;
birds chittered and quarrelled and littered,
now concrete structures loomed high above

Once in my childhood in this small town
superlative trees towered high above
covering the burning sun
spreading cool shadows;
birds chittered and quarrelled and littered,
now concrete structures loomed high above

I often bend down to collect a few footprints,
in the shapelessness of darkness, I see a shadow,
I pluck one to meet myself in a new time,
It is a process I do not want to forget anymore.
soft white candles. Each togetherness
calms heart and fills the smell of absence.

There must be something in crawling on the space,
gripping the earth
by forelegs
and then moving the hind legs forward
finding newer grounds to embrace
moving slowly but surely

When in an ancient Australian forest,
don’t look up,
look down instead.
Beneath your feet, below the veins, laid out in secret–
red, purple,
moss-green mushrooms.