A Blue Alaap
Years will pass before I master
the sign language of your mouth.
With this knowledge then I will travel to the city at your throat and lose myself in the crowds buslting about in its squares.
Then rich in this city's wealth, its whispers, its low moans, I will trek south, beyond the peaks, To the wide plain of your belly.
This is what I am learning tonight: how music unfolds from your body like foam from a wave or the wings of a butterfly opening and closing.
This is what I am learning tonight: How to ride the wave, break open the chrysalis, and reach in a century or two, the sea that sleeps in your eyes.
Note: Written in the intermission between Raga Bhoop and Raga Shivranjani, to submilate the itch in the palms to paw, very crudely, the then present muse.
My Poems
... link (no comments) ... comment
Ghazal - Anand Vivek Taneja
So much time has passed that from my locality a refugee I have become.
So much has happened since, that from Being a refugee I have become.
On this island, in this city of stone, where to look for the beloved’s image? Years ago, from the believers, the idol-worshippers a refugee I have become.
Heart’s pockets have long been emptied but what I can do, Friend, for from tight fistedness a refugee I have become.
In a tavern at the square, an account has long been open, But what use when from intoxication a refugee I have become.
In this city of blazing speed, all the avenues are wide and beautiful. But what use, now that from wandering a refugee I have become?
Note: As Anand, the poet of cities and I were hanging out in a basement bar off Washington Square in New York last evening, knocking back Guiness, I asked him if he had written a ghazal recentl, to which he replied that, yes, he had written a ghazal, on the backs of visiting cards and bills, and then procceded to unfold one sher after the next in Urdu, all the while giving me a running commentry on the multi-valencies of many of the words he had employed in the ghazal.
For example, take mohajir, that politcially loaded term which in the subcontinental conciousness stands for people displaced by the trauma of the Partition, which can mean refugee (the meaning I have deployed in the translation above) or exile (which Anand employs in his own English translation) or wanderer. Also it was only appropriate that I had, in absence of paper, transcribed his recitation in the brochure for PEN World Voices Festival, for this, doston, was a real ghazal.
I can't wait until May 11-12 when all the ghazal-lers come out of the New York woodwork to begin a bulandi, i.e., a revolt of word, sound, and meaning, in the light of that other revolt of 1857, from some hundred and fifty years ago.
Translations
... link (no comments) ... comment