Day Fifteen #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 15 Prompt

And now for our prompt (optional, as always).  K. Siva Reddy’s poem, “A Love Song Between Two Generations,” weaves together repetitions, questions, and unexpected similes with plain language. The overall effect is both intimate and emotional, producing a long-form meditation on what love is, what it means, and how it acts.  Today, we’d like you to write your own poem that muses on love, but isn’t a traditional love poem in the sense of expressing love between romantic partners.

Love in the times of uncertainty

 

I used to think I have a good core

till I discovered oil wells lying hidden in sandy depths

of all the times I must have birthed, rebirthed

human, cat, caterpillar, ant, lizard

amassing indifference like old wealth

indifferent to everything except accumulation

like rotting jungles, forests, trees

when they succumb

to pressure, and turn fossil

 

One wrong turn

a dig too deep and I tap into my potential

to erupt

erase the eastern sky,

with dark, dense energy

and set ablaze all the edges and all the pages

I have so carefully curated to

document my image—

how I’ve never savoured hot coals of hate on my tongue

never hated anyone—

even if they’ve done me wrong or

called me names because they’re racists are/or misogynists

No. Never. Hate is too heavy a word. Too abrasive.

The reason why we are where we are, I point out

like influencers on Insta, I'm convinced

I'm right.

 

I am all love,

Right?

 

But you’ve shown me my silence—

when I stone wall you

for days.

I can practice indifference like a fundamentalist practises her religion.

 

You, on the other hand, who never learnt how to thread

and alternate words, nods, pauses, concern

thread and alternate

kindness with understanding words

is always there

Always

when my silence is spent

and I return confused

if the lacunae before me

are my outpourings or past karma?

 

You are I are a Venn Diagram

so much of you I see but cannot reach

so much of me you see as a distant mystery

but there is an intersection where your inability to express

overlaps my practised self-preserving-indifference

our two in-actions, in-actives hold hands

in the middle—maybe this is love

 

Or could it be the line

that carves out two circles out of many universes

and places them next to each other

Perfectly

not smothering or othering

just the right amount of oblong

not big, not showy—

maybe, this is love

 

Thank you for stopping by and for your comments.

 

Day Fourteen #Na/GloPoWriMo

 Day 14 Prompt

And now for our (optional!) prompt. Poetry is an ancient art, and one that revisits themes that existed thousands of years ago – love, nature, jealousy. But that doesn’t mean that poets live in a sort of pre-history unaffected by technological advances. Emily Dickinson wrote about trains, and I’m rather charmed by this 1981 poem about the “incredible hair” of actors on television. In a more recent example, Becca Klaver’s “Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie” draws inspiration from the contemporary drive to document everything in digital photographs. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.

Happy writing!

An Ode to Unopened E-mails

Why do I keep thee?

Two Thousand and Two Hundred Fifty

unopened

emails -

unread, saved, some even spam.

 

I tend to thee like a temple dancer

tends to her tired feet.

She doesn’t stop.

How can she 

when her ankle bells continue

to chime with probabilities?

Born in the gap

between the end

of my fingertips

and the clack of laptop keys

lies a pond -

a pond of possibilities

 

Comfy in my shore-

this Ikea chair with lumbar support,

I watch

the ripples die and birth

beneath days, heavy 

and empty

of acceptance

while grace hovers

like a fidgety dragonfly

flit-flit-flitting fleetingly 

on the surface of an un-min(e)d  pond -

the pond of possibilities

possibilities are deep

deep like a maybe

maybe flirts with memories

memories are pages

pages turn

turn to death

death is wise

wise like a witch

witches pick plants, crack eggs

eggs make cakes

cakes taste nice

 

nice like an unopened mail

mail with a subject line

a line that says:

Congratulations!

Or

You’ve won!

Or

Hot at Fifty!

Or

Or

Or

Like I said, unopened mail

is a pond

A

Pond

Of

Possibilities...

 

Thank you for stopping by.  

Day Thirteen #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 13 Prompt

To get started with today’s prompt, first read Walter de la Mare’s poem “A Song of Enchantment.” Then, John Berryman’s poem “Footing Our Cabin’s Lawn, Before the Wood.” Both poems work very differently, yet leave you with a sense of the near-fantastical possibilities of the landscapes they describe. Try your hand today at writing your own poem about a remembered, cherished landscape. It could be your grandmother’s backyard, your schoolyard basketball court, or a tiny strip of woods near the railroad tracks. At some point in the poem, include language or phrasing that would be unusual in normal, spoken speech – like a rhyme, or syntax that feels old-fashioned or high-toned.

Happy writing!

Some of the lines and images in today's poem are borrowed from a work-in-progress piece about my trek in the North Eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh in September 2025. 

spring arrives in the autumn of neem

 

Ajoh, my young Arunachali guide, proclaims,

“The forest will remember your footsteps,”

and places both her palms on dewy drops

cupped in moss

mossmossmosssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss, everywhere

you behold

wave upon verdant wave

like a song on loop

hugging limbs, groins, armpits

thick girths, swinging canopies

of the rainforest trees—

too tall, too ancient, too majestic

to hold

in a single shot,

in a single lifetime

 

“We call them ancestors

and stop in prayer, whenever, wherever,” she says.

 

I follow her lead and sink my palms in the green,

greengreengreengreengreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen moss

drunk on dew, the moss springs up its spongy arms

and I’m held first, then

slowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwly I sink

in pre-historic mystery, maybe even God—

my feebles, foibles, falsehoods absorbed 

in between the in-between

 

Afterwards, Ajoh and I will hug

at the edge of the forest

knee deep in muck, mud

and rest our bamboo sticks

against the breasts of this slice of this Himalayan ridge

 

If this were my end

I’d end

in peace

 

Alas!

Pray, pay heed

 

Not long after,

a stupid war will flourish

across the middle of our geography—

to finetune

our sonic sensibilities

we will know how to tell them apart:

missile from thunder,

thunder from drone,

drone from hoover, and

hoover from arrested heartbeat

 

While the doves, the bulbuls, the sparrows and the mynahs

in the patch of green that covers

the continent between our front door and garden wall

will flock in shock, all at once at am of thirty past three

and our tree of neem will beseech

its fleece of golden leaves

to not let go

just yet,

to not tremble like bells

in temples, churches, schools

From my window I will watch

our neem raise her arms to the heavens

in prayer

 

What religion, pray tell, is neem?

Arunachal

Ajoh 

Day Twelve #Na/GloPoWriMo

 Day 12 Prompt: 

 Amarjit Chandan has a pretty wild biography, but his poetry is often focused on place and memory – with his hometown of Nakodar appearing repeatedly. His poem “Uncle Mohan Singh” recounts, with a sort of dreaminess, a memory of the titular uncle playing the accompaniment to a silent film. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem that recounts a memory of a beloved relative, and something they did that echoes through your thoughts today.

Happy writing!

As soon as I saw the title of Amarjit Chandan's poem, I knew I could only write about my uncle, Chacha. This is a straightforward pouring. Thank you for reading.

  

Khem Chacha 

 

My first memory of Chacha is sweet and fluffy

like freshly bought pineapple pastry,

One for Seema.

One for me.

 

We were five and four and Chacha, twenty.

In his Chacha voice—as clear as a math subtraction

2 – 2 = 0

he said, I could afford only two.

Eat them in your room.

 

There was a power cut that night. No one in our joint-family

noticed our creamy moustaches

as we sat down for dinner,

on my grandmother’s kitchen floor.

 

Chacha loved us like his own.

Even after he graduated college,

got married and was blessed

with two daughters 

of his own.

 

Home, after our mother died

was Chacha’s corner shop.

Hardboiled candies and 2- minute Maggi

noodles--sustenance enough to manoeuvre

our step mother.

 

In November 2024,

Chacha said on a  Zoom call—

Now that I’ve seen you,

I’ll live a hundred years.

 

I woke up the next day,

with a strange taste of

my cousin’s WhatsApp words

that would reach me later.

 

I knew before

my phone pinged.

 

Soon after the zoom call, 

he asked the priest to place him on the floor.

My cousin’s words stayed sprinkled

like icing sugar

undisturbed

on a slice of cake, one saves for later,

for many days.

 

Notes:

When death is imminent, Hindus place the person on a clean mat on the floor as it is believed that it helps the spirit to reconnect with the earth's energy for a smooth transition to the next life.  

Day Eleven #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 11 Prompt:

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

This was a fun prompt. My first erasure poetry. I wish I had the time to upload images of the photocopied page. It's a mess. 

I asked the husband to pick a page from Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. I bought a copy of the novel  a few years ago, but haven't managed to read it yet. So, the text on the page was new. 

From page 390 of The Luminaries

 

My shade summoned to a shilling séance

I expect to evade, forestall time

to spy upon

a very lonely world—

unable to touch

or altar it

 

In New Zealand native tradition,

the soul, when it dies, becomes a star

 

Perhaps, I will

moleskin and serge

the prospect of panning for gold

not ready to begin

new life

 

 

Day Ten #Na/GloPoWriMo

Day 10 Prompt: 

In his poem, “Goodbye,” Geoffrey Brock describes grief in three short stanzas, the second of which is entirely made up of a rhetorical dialogue. Today, write your own meditation on grief. Try using Brock’s form as the “container” for your poem: a few short stanzas, with a middle section in which a question is repeated with different answers given.

Thank you for stopping by and for reading my poems. This photo was taken a while back in the Seychelles. 

Day Eight #Na/GloPoWriMo

 Day 8 Prompt:

In his poem, “Poet, No Thanks,” Jean D’Amérique repeats the phrase “I wasn’t a poet” multiple times, while describing other things that he instead claims to have been. In your poem for today, use a simple phrase repeatedly, and then make statements that invert or contradict that phrase.

Last night was particularly tricky. There's a ceasefire for now. Let's hope for good sense to make a come back. 

Also, I love earrings. These ones were bought in 2017 in Bhuj, Kutchch.