A poem about the things that return.
Friends
They never leave,
But if they do –
They shall return, for all
Friendships are acts of faith and
Ropes of trust upon which two individuals
Balance each other
And the world.
Tag: Poems
GloPoWriMo 2020: 29/30
Oof, penultimate day – and another year will now go by without writing any poetry at all (but a lot of reading, I would hope). Today’s prompt is to write about a pet. I do not have one, but I love pets. I thought this was a great opportunity to write a humorous haiku:
Tamagotchi
I wanted a pet,
So bought something virtual,
It broke in a day.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 28/30
Martha Dickinson Bianchi’s description of her aunt’s cozy room, scented with hyacinths and a crackling stove, warmly recalls the setting decades later. Describe a bedroom from your past in a series of descriptive paragraphs or a poem. It could be your childhood room, your grandmother’s room, a college dormitory or another significant space from your life.
Gosh, today’s prompt is a doozy. So many rooms to pick from.
A-201
The bedroom was to the left of the hall,
Its door right behind the tiny desk I called my office,
You wouldn’t have considered the possibility that 3 slept in the room,
But for us, it never felt too little.
Straight ahead from the door was the attached bathroom,
A small alleyway to the right led you to the rest,
A large king-sized bed to stretch out your legs,
White cupboards lining the walls to store clothes, books, the very best.
Originally there was a large, Alder Hardwood Table,
Resplendent in the light that hit it,
A Windows 98 Desktop computer rest comfortably there,
“Tell Me Why?” played on the VCR mounted in the right corner top,
On a small black television that I watched from the bed.
Soon, however, my parents wanted me to be independent,
So one summer, when I was in India – a remodelling was done –
The computer table disappeared altogether, the VCR did too,
I came back to find a bunk-bed in its place: capacity – one.
I’ve played cricket in the space between the bed and mine,
Chipped off edges of walls with tennis balls,
I’ve hit my head on the edge of the bed with a towel on my head
(Ruining my kindergarten photo no less),
And hurt myself in that house countless times.
However if I search within myself to find, really
Find the person I am,
It seems to me it all started in that room, because
Today I have a room with a bunk-bed, with cupboards underneath,
I keep my books neatly organized, stacked, yet, food in the room,
I do not eat.
The royal blue on my pin-board matches those old cupboards well,
And the wood in my room is Alder too,
You may leave houses and rooms, it is evident –
But they will never leave you.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 27/30
Today’s prompt is to write a poetic review.
Curd Rice
How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways –
I love thee as the perfect palate cleanser
Between courses in a meal,
The ultimate finale to them all.
I love thee as my meal itself,
With tadka, with pomegranate,
Or the simplicity in plain serving,
I love thee on plates,
In bowls,
And from banana leaves,
In English,
In Kannada,
In Tamil, and Hindi – even in tongues I don’t speak,
I love thee across continents,
Europe, the Americas, and
Africa too
I’ll find you to in Antarctica if I had to,
Mosaranna, I love you.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 26/30
I don’t quite enjoy today’s almanac questionnaire prompt. I’m also in the mood to write haiku, so that’s what I’m going to do. Since I recorded a piano cover of “You’ll Be Back” from Hamilton: An American Musical (see here), this was the only thing that felt appropriate.
King George III
My loyal, royal
Subjects will be back to see
They belong to me.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 25/30
It’s difficult to put a prompt like today’s into words, so here’s the hyperlink to the original. As is the case with most poems that ask me to do more than one thing, I find it easiest to try to incorporate as many as I can without taking too much stress.
10 Seconds
In a ten-second span a lot goes through my head,
Its’ incredible to me how I can sway from joy to
Angst, to sadness, to
Dread,
Yet what I admire is the tenacity of the brain – to
Find the small spots of yellow in a
Palette that can sometimes feel grey.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 24/30
Today’s prompt is to write about a fruit of my choice.
Tomatoes
An identity crisis that is exacerbated by
Cousins such as eggplant,
Capsicum and Pumpkin,
Cucumber, it’s true!
Pomology is confusing,
Binomial classification too.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 23/30
It’s a little sad that’s we’re down to our final week of GloPoWriMo already. Another 7 poems and we’re done for the year. Today’s optional prompt asks me to write a poem springboarding from the shape of a letter in the alphabet.
P
Like a proud windsock,
Or a hoisted flag,
A cutlass, unangled,
A scimitar with a handle,
Portable paper fans,
All of these represent the letter P,
Initially just a box in Hieroglyphy.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 22/30
Today’s poem asks me to use a saying from a language other than English, and make that the starting. I picked “The pillow is the best adviser”, a saying in Swedish.
Sleep
When confronted with the unpleasant,
The difficult, the disenchanting,
I put my head on my pillow, and close my eyes, and
Try to drift off for a while,
Amidst tears, and even when I’m upset, I hope
Pray, that I’ll wake up wiser,
Particularly since the pillow is the best adviser.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 21/30
Today’s poem provides a lovely opportunity to look at poems from other languages and create a homophonic translation.
I picked the following verse from the poem, Meteor, which is originally written in Slovak. I wanted to pick a language without a Latin base to make it tougher for me to create a homophonic translation:
Pripravili sme ti strašnú smrť.
Nechali sme ťa klbčiť sa so šelmami.
Mysleli sme si, že si jednou z nich.
Dovolili sme ti skrížiť
mliečne zuby s ihličkami,
lastúry mäkkých nechtov s pazúrmi.
Here’s my translation
Meteor
Primarily, smells suffocated me,
Not smells to combine with salami,
But smells yes, those smells, shallow and rich,
Drearily smells, they squeeze
Millenniums and ruby, entangled origami,
The story makes nectar seem like blasphemy.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 20/30
Today’s prompt is very nice. It asks me to write about a handmade, or a homemade gift I’ve received. I’m grateful to have people who have gifted me some really, really meaningful gifts over the years. This one stands out though:
Cookie Bouquet
Glass stirrers wound tightly with royal blue chart paper and a
Purple ribbon held the sweetest gift I’ve received – a bouquet of
Twelve cookies.
These golden disks of joy wrapped in
Tin foil to preserve freshness,
Forgetting that I was a monster who ate them all at
One go.
The cookies lasted twenty minutes at the end of the day
I was giddy:
Didn’t know if I had won every jackpot,
Every carnival game,
Or if it was just love –
The subsequent nap confirmed it was but,
A sugar rush.
GloPoWriMo 2020: 19/30
Okay, NaPoWriMo’s prompt today was to do a walking archive: where you go for a walk and gather interesting things from that walk. Owing to the present circumstances with COVID-19, their very helpful suggestion is to walk around the house and pick up interesting things at home. I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I think the idea of a walking archive has made me think about the act of walking itself, and how much I miss the freedom of walking wherever I’d like.
On Strolls
The only walks I take these days are to buy groceries –
Nothing else,
No speed-walking around campus to get from my hostel to the administrative block,
Or to get from one end of the administrative block to the other.
I never ran,
Always speed-walked,
Even at school, as if being late to class would
Be the end of me.
What I wonder today, though, is what
I’ve missed while speed-walking
How many cricket matches I could have caught a glimpse of at The Oval?
How many times my friends in school would have convinced me, in the
hallways,
To bunk Physics – and
I know that after this lockdown ends,
I will take a stroll,
Meander through the streets,
Traipse along the pathways,
Deliberately – so
I never forget what a privilege it is to be able to walk freely without
The threat of illness in the air.
Tejas Rao 