Poetry in Our Time

 

Guna Moran

1.

CRAB

 

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed

-William Ernest Henley

As it crawls along
With its sinewy legs
People laugh at it

As it stares
Lifting the eyes
Onlooker sneers

No one gives a damn to it
Omnivores bludgeons it to death
If found on the way

Moving this way invites disregard
The other way it is contempt

The cornered crabs
Finding no other way
Takes refuge in the hole
Declaring self-incarceration

After a long break
The day it comes out of the hole
Gets to hear various news of the outside world

Of the people
That used to laugh at the crab
Some got their family breaks up
Some their finds their dreams broken
Someone else’s white dress gets stained

Leaving the street side news right there
The crab from the hole returns to its hole
And shuts the mouth of the hole
So that the disgusting news
Cannot enter into their tiny household

2.

NO POEM

The river only knows
Which point of the heart
The impact of the insane wave
Breaking through the barrier
Hits the hardest

In a flowing river
When the current stalls
Poet is distressed

The poet can neither eat nor drink
The poet loses sleep
Over the thought of a stagnated river

Like a garden without a flower
The stagnated brooks cannot sing
No one moves closer to watch the movement of the water
The moon do not come down to water for frolic

Slowly a rust red layer deposits
On the face of the brook

The drying river
Unpeeling the pain in the heart
cannot say – no flow

The poet
That understands the river
Like the story called
No pain
Cannot write down – no poem.

3.

SUN

 

Providing light for a distance
Light is my identity

Stay so far away
Coming near
To eulogise me
Praise you are incapable

To spread rumour to defame me
Looking eye to eye
Calumny your eyes are artificial

Which river flowed down
To merge into which sea
Every background story
Dances as a nude image
At my finger tips

Providing light
And looking from above
At all of you
Individually

One can see better down
Looking from above

4.

THE ARROWS PIERCING THE BOSOM ARE NOT ARROWS

 

After great pain,
a formal feeling comes
– Emily Dickinson

Moving at an electric speed
The arrows get wedged on the bosom
Do not pierce through
Like a bullet

Only one bosom
Pricking-poking of so many arrows

In raw flesh
Sorrow of blue clotted blood
Furrows continuously

So tiny
This heart
How will it bear
The stinging of poison-arrows
Shot by you
The master archer

5.

LIGHT TOO TAKES TIME TO TRAVEL

 

The shining star
Dead or alive
Admirer of light
O’ my eyes

The day the star would perish
O my dear eyes
You’d continue to get light

If it has died by this time
You are still getting the light

As the light traverses along
Your bones would gather mosses

Still it would continue to travel

To reach
The light too takes some time

Translated from Assamese into English by Bibekananda Choudhury

Bio :

Guna Moran is an internationally acclaimed Assamese poet and book reviewer. His poems are published in 300 hundred international magazines,journals,webzines,blogs, newspapers, anthologies .Some of them are Indian Literature, Indian Poetry Review, Indian Review, Indian Periodical , Muse India, Outlook India, The Asian Age ,The Asian, Southern Quill, International Writer’s Journal, International Times Magazine, AZAHAR Revista Poetica , The Poet Magazine, The Global Youth Review ,Whatcom Watch Newspaper , Spillword, Merak Magazine, Quidditty, Lovina 103 ,Indiana University Press , The California Times Newspaper, Poetry Hall , The Piker Press , Bario Blues Press, North eastern University Journal, Elements Magazine .He has won Creator Of Justice Award 2020 by International Human Right Art Festival and got a chance for reading poetry in Frankfurt Book Fair 2020 ( Digital edition).His poems have already been translated into Croatian, Tagalog ( Philippines) , Burmese, Swahili ( Kenya ) , Indonesian, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Macedonian, Chinese, Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Turkish, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi, Urdu, Gujrati, Arabic, Bengali . He has published three poetry books to his credit. The are – When The Tree Weeps, Time Will Write History On You, El Amor – Love On The Rocks ( Jointly ). He had been invited to join poetry programme organised by America, Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Mumbai, Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, West Bangla, Panorama International Literature Festival 2022 and many more.

Address:
Country : India
State: Assam
District: Sivasagar
Email : gunaassamindia85@gmail.com
Twitter: @gunamoran
Phone : 96785 72267

 

 

Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad

TRANSLATED BY:

‏‪Catherine Cobham

Two Birds

The distance between them is almost zero
In a frantic race in marathons where doping is banned
They compete with one another
Smashing records
Always on the point of coming up with something new
A fight taken seriously
Engines running on diesel
Head up and ready
Legs bound in a crystal belt
Wings always on the trigger
Radar systems sending out warning waves
But there are hidden gods who set the rhythm
The two compete above a world sown up with a needle and thread
Two birds one from Texas the other from Shanghai
Glance furtively at the future
Use falsehoods to identify threats
Two opponents playing chess on the clouds
One showing signs of pain long borne
I don’t know what they’re doing at that height
How they ended up there
What madness this
What art
What trouble
One of them will overthrow the other
That’s where things are heading
We don’t know when and how
But one of them is about to fall
Maybe both
Maybe I should say
There will be a fall
On embers that crackle in the imagination of trees
On songs that flow from air-raid sirens
On wrecks of ships that once were a prophet’s last refuge
This fall
Doesn’t have to mean it’s the end (at least not always)
But it is.

 

 

The Ninth Bomb

Just like that with no prior warning
The ninth bomb will explode
In this unassuming street
It will explode from extreme depression
As a possible cause or the only cause
And the clouds close to the incident
Will be transformed
Into cold body parts
And the dreams that wake up at four in the morning will die
And the strings of the violin played by the wind will be severed
Passersby will piss in their pants
And the demand for blood for rare groups in particular will rise
Quadratic equations will change
When the speed of flight from death
Is measured in hertz
Trees will lie flat on the ground
And never rise again
The Security Council will hold
A session of denunciation and condemnation or perhaps not
As some god will declare a period of mourning
For three days
That CO2-breathing bomb will explode
As best it can
In a moment of madness hitting the detonator linked to the TNT charge
Concussion is something like that
It will explode with its four major arteries
With its vocal chords
Explode in a manner displaying much art and much death
Like destiny
Destroying itself in its final sunset

Away from the microscope

Away from the scourge of censorship
Explain to us how an iron will dissolves in the face of hammer blows
And how the sun protects itself from heart attacks
And how gardenias bloom on walls that breathe crushed concrete
Away from the guardians of virtue
Steer clear of the words that sever umbilical cords
Rouse them from their slumber with mosquito spray or something harsher
Knead them with the music that frees roads from their darkness
Let them expel all the sighs suppressed within them
Load them with the freedom that shakes the firmness of iron fists
And train them
To box with sandbags
To crush Siberian ice
To strain their vocal chords
To pull tight the belt round the waist of the wind
Steer clear of the words that smell the corpse of nothingness
Words that don’t rely on support from any god
And let them build and destroy the world you will not see
The consequences will not be as great as you imagine
There is no longer a marked difference between right and wrong.

Abdul Karim Al-Ahmad, an author from Syria. currently reside in Germany.writes poetry, stories, and social blogs. IHis poems have also been translated into many international languages, and he won the Ossi di Seppia International Poetry Prize in Italy as the best author. A foreigner.

 

Harihar Jha

I Don’t Know Why?

I see a crying hungry child
My hands dip in a philosophical puzzle
What is hunger and what is pain?
What is body and what is a soul?
I see a woman being dragged by a sinner
My eyes searching for the answer.
Who is victim here and who is a culprit?
What is love and what is lust?
Live knives and crying dead bodies
In a communal riot
My ears only want to listen
Who is Hindu here and who is Muslim
Who are my own?
And the rest are aliens.
I don’t know why?
My eyes, ears , hands and legs
Have turned into Mind
And where is my Mind?
Dancing like a puppet
To the tune of these cunning snake-charmers.

My Death

The Death has drawn a line on me
Mind in blunder, my heart in wonder
I see the death coming near me

Spreading black veil, making me blind
Shaking my bones, and veins are blown
A wave in melody piercing my mind

Song from the birds rolling on a death cup
What clouds reveal, wet fragrance I feel
From earth to cosmos, umbrella opens up

With love I am ready to be breakfast next
Death licking me while I taste my death
My soul is fulfilled but ego perplexed

The world is dissolved, I’m going to die
Nothingness looming and silence blooming
Peace everywhere I’m flying in the sky.

Order from heavens passing my ears
Take me my dear with joy and cheers
People around me why shedding tears?

Her Teasing Face

so much introvert and reserved I am
unfriendly nature, badly I behave
get angry at slightest provocation
why do I conceal myself in a cave

to share joy and win my friendship she tells
in my ears, stories of her private life
by e-mail she sends honeymoon photos
she knows I could become her husband’s wife

why isn’t she happy with my lover?
with me why would she maintain any link?
why at all she talks about her hubby?
she enjoys making me jealous, I think

I see everywhere teasing face of her
not to lose temper, solace I prefer