Gopal Lahiri

Gopal Lahiri Is poetry dying?

Poetry and Prose Poetry is not dying. It is merely changing. It’s a way to attain life without boundaries. Poetry has never been a booming industry. Poetry is all around us and is still a way of life. “Do people still read poetry?” This question revolves around for a while and this also alarmingly suggests: “Poets are only talking to each other.” In doing so, somewhere along the way, the overreaching impulse behind the writing poems has been dwindling over the years. It is also true that very few people read contemporary poetry but still poetry survives ages and highlights some key moments and trajectories of life. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time. (Macbeth by Shakespeare) It is the means of expression that exist from time immemorial. Rhyming poetry was with us since ancient time. It’s an oral art and ear poetry was the order of the day. End rhyming is more popular than any other form. But with passage of time, poetry has undergone changes and readership shows declining trend. Rhyming poems are almost passe now. Free verse is more accepted now. “The heightened consciousness” in poetry still reminds us that the ideas are not necessarily doomed in “utopia and dreamscape.”

Prose has become more popular in recent times because it’s a more direct art form where readers can communicate directly to the author and is being written more now because it is easier to consume, it gets consumed by even larger mass. Poetry does not sell, it’s a truth. There may be a few exceptions. But that does not stop anyone of writing poems. Now people are writing more poetry. Prose is easy to understand with your ideas explained easily. Poetry is meant to have many layers of meaning, moving from shadows to light and can be best understood when you explain your ideas. Sometimes one cannot understand poetry in a single read. It takes time for ideas to sink in and understand from reader’s point of view. ‘Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth’ so said Samuel Johnson. ‘Poetry is the crown of literature’ said Somerset Maugham. Robert Browning went to the extent of saying ‘God is a perfect poet.’ I, too sing America I am the darker brother They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes But I laugh And eat well And grow strong (Langston Hughes) So, it requires a bit of learning for the readers, the form, the structure, the metaphor and simile, the metaphysical and surreal forms etc. Poetry is basically an interplay of words and rhythm. It often employs rhyme and meter. Right words are in right order. When people are emotionally drained, they often express them through some form of poetry. Poets compare poetry to mist, the alarming waters of storm. A new path of expression, the post-modern poetry asks questions of life. Dylan Thomas wrote long back,’ Do not go gentle into that Good Night’ and the natural instinct is for life, not death. Yes, death is inevitable but people should fight for life and the poem inspires us. True Poetry is a way to bridge, to make bridges from one continent to another, one country to another, one person to another, one time to another. The poet strikes a right note if the reader is able to understand the nuances of poetry.

Layers in Poetry There is a dynamic spontaneity, and multiplicity, contrast and risk. The transient is enjoyed for its own sake. Humour, satire, sentiments are all there with strength and nonchalance and that is the beauty, the hidden magnet in the poems. Intuition and intellect join hands. Here - colours, clouds, patterns capture the creative space. Words are the tour guide, moving from shadow to sunlight and the terrain, sometimes, tarnished and at other times dazzling like Van Gogh’s Sunflowers Poets like to express themselves in a way they never could before. It allows them to say what they want while still leaving the true meaning up to interpretation, beyond metrics and rhyme. It is a form of art that is unique, special and borders on a creative outlet. There is no denying that poetry is one of the most powerful instruments for our survival. It is one mode of transport one takes on the long way through unknowing. Poems are not really written; they just happen as a reward of listening to inside and the surrounds. The sensory images that arrive and stay when we are open to the world around us. One can appreciate poetry from a moment in time. That moment when finally, instead of being asked to heal and forgive, they are allowed the vengeance, the rage that is rightfully ours. ‘Alone, alone on a wide sea’ (Emily Dickinson) or ‘Grow old with me/The best is yet to be’. (W.B. Yeats) Poetry can attack us suddenly, sharply, so deftly we hardly notice. Readers have to be there to feel the effect. Its true poetry can’t stop your digestion but can take your breaths away. I believe that’s what’s so powerful about poetry. Happiness…not in another place But this place, not for another hour But this hour. ------A song for Occupations (Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass)

Recent Trend

Poetry reading in US in 2017 is up from 6.7% to 12% since 2012 according to the survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA).

Social media has a great impact in surge of poetry reading/writing. In fact, commoners start writing poetry as age is no barrier. 28 million people picked up a poem in 2017. According to National Endowment of Arts, US, poetry is more popular now than ever and Social media could be partially responsible. Social media poetry is suddenly everywhere on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and increasingly in print too. These short poems accompanied by illustrations are shared by countless readers. Famous artists like Rupi Kaur, Amanda Lovelace have millions of followers. Who follow for a dose of poetry and inspiration? They have helped poetry go viral in a way it has not been able to do before. Then there are numerous poetry organizations o different geographical locations and from different backgrounds, races, ethnicities and genders all over the world have increased the growth of poetry. Poetry is making a story out of a moment. You can unpack any moment in many different ways. Yes, the quality of poetry is a concern but those poems will not stand to the test of the time. Philip Larkins observes that performance poetry is a fashion and this has led to a kind of poetry that you can understand first go- easy rhythms, easy emotions, easy syntax. Serious poetry normally is quieter and deeper to linger with you for a longer period of time. And the verse that uses subtler charms are sure to win you over. Forget the ink, the milk, the blood All was washed clean with the flood We rose up from the falling waters The fallen rain’s own son and daughters And none of this, none of this (Rain by JH Prynne.)

Corporate World Impact In corporate world or even in business, poetry now act as a stress buster. Haiku moment gives peace of mind. Poetry is really practical in the sense that it grounds you in what’s possible with

language. In governance, fundraising and communication, bringing imagination to question and look at the languages is a new concept. The act of distilling information in 5-7-5 syllable format to capture the wonder of the human experience in the simplest of terms. Poetry Unbound podcast are popular amongst listeners. When societies are fractured, poetry always rises. Poetry is also useful in workplace. Making sense of strange grouping of words require an agile form of listening. - one that can bridge ambiguity and keep pace with a poet’s linguistic leaps. In poetry, one allows ambivalence and ambiguity of multiple meanings to coexist. It creates space for hospitality and complexity as said Padraig O Trauma, an Irish theologian and poet. He suggests that business professionals, have a latent facility for poetry It is believed that Poetry can change us. One can turn to poetry to express which cannot be expressed easily. It’s to convey thoughts and emotions through beautiful or ordinary words.

Future and Unfounded Apprehension Even if, as Christian Bok has claimed poetry in the future will be written by machine for other machines to read, there will be, for the foreseeable future, someone behind the curtain inventing those drones; so that even if literature is reducible to mere code- an intriguing idea- the smartest minds behind them will be considered our greatest authors. It is impossible to suspend judgement and folly to dismiss quality. If all language can be transformed to quality. Success lies in knowing what to include and more important what to leave out. If all language can be transformed into poetry by merely reframing- an exciting possibility- then poetry can be written. World poetry day was declared by UNESCO in 1999. It’s become a celebration of all kinds of poetry. The new poetry is realistic. The poet's consciousness of the grim realities of life has shattered all illusions and romantic dreams. The tragedy of everyday life has induced in the poet a mood of

disillusionment. So, the poetry today is in general bitter and pessimistic. The pessimism of the modern poet is very poignant and heart-rending. It is even sharper than the pessimism of Hardy. Because it arises out of the contemplation of the stark realities of life. There is nothing sentimental about it and poetry is as if extraction of poems from pain and wounds. The Modern and post-modern poetry are a poetry of revolt. It results largely from the impact of science. The poet turns away from the older romantic tradition. The revolt is best exemplified in the poetry of T.S. Eliot. The poet sees life in its naked realism. Poets welcome even the most prosaic and commonplace subjects are considered suitable.

The imagery and vocabulary of the modern poet reflects the influence of science and scientific inventions. Realism in subject matter has led the modern poet to reject the highly, ornate and condensed poetic style of the romantics in favour of a language which resembles closely the language of everyday life and connect with the readers

At the end it can be surmised that poetry is alive and more vibrant now and this trend will continue in future also. As it is the soul of the humans which can never be destroyed.

Gopal Lahiri, is a bilingual poet with 22 books to his credits. His poems have been published across journals/ anthologies worldwide and translated in 12 languages.

Ahmad Kamal Abdullah

A twinkle uyghur star in the sky of Xinjiang

If your tears falling down oo Uyghur Let’s say, those are our tears too falling down If your blood bleeding oh Uyghur Let’s say, those are our blood too bleeding If your eyes’s ball comes out oo Uyghur Let’s say, those our eyes’ ball coming out too If your heart piercing by bouyonet oo Uyghur Let’s say, our heart were piercing by the bouyonet too Uyghur were kicked and triggered by bullets Lets say, we too were being kicked and triggered by bullets Rasulullah with ripe smiling and waving at you From the planet, the al-Mighty keeps on embracing Uyghur screaming out in the fold of al-Rahman Burning up the condemned atheistic Hans’ brutality Uyghur fortifying with their chests and Faith The Prime Love, unity of longing in Shahadah. Uyghur! Uyghur! Your Love blossoms Becoming the shinning Stars on the Sky of al-Fattah.

31st January 2019

And this deep lonesomeness

The Night’s Sun. And the Day’s Moon Hanging At Kediri lonesomeness.

And this momentum and intuitively Is Layla’s love has genuinity? Is this, the mountain of Wisdom? Sadness within three words.

Your cry of desire Slicing My Self Sky.

And this deep lonesomeness.

Dato Dr Ahmad Kamal Abdullah is the National Laureate Malaysia. Known widely as Kemala in South East Asia. He is the winner of SEA Write of Thailand (1986). DASAWARSA LIMA (Five Decades) is his completed book of poems from 1960-2013 (DBP 2016). He was innagurated with Knighthood (Dato’ Paduka Mahkota Selangor) by the Palace of Selangor. He writes poetry, short strory, essay and criticism.

Mahnaz Badihian

I only can suspect

I suspect a night as perfect as tonight The floral curtains are dancing like drunken ballerinas with a breeze through an open window next to a painting of a lady with scared eyes and gaping open mouth I hear frogs calling to each other next to morning glories and smell of stock touching green sheets on my bed where a man, like a naked statue, is sleeping Next door there's a room I never knew, I hear a voice, as if she has forgot losing her son, my brother, her country and her youth. From the window, I also see the girl They shot on the street, washing her face her blood pouring next to poplar trees worried that I may wake up trees and disturb frogs and never find the girl, they shot on the streets of Tehran No longer I hear frogs but I feel the breeze on my green pillow putting me to sleep early morning!

From the balcony

We bend over from the balcony, from the windows of our car, from crowded roadsides from the shattered windows in all continents, with our hands stretched for unity Whisper to each other : we are all members of one family our name, skin, nationality are only variety in the human garden

Fertile soul

I give birth to a new woman in myself every day the art of multiplication grows new buds in me I feel life crawling on my shoulders, the gods of fertility will never let me stop being a woman.

Mahnaz Badihian is a poet, painter, and translator whose work has been published in several languages worldwide, including Persian, Italian, French, Turkish, Spanish, and Malayalam. Her latest collection of poems," Raven of Isfahan," was published in 2019.

Hemant Divate

Begun to rust

The creepers in my balcony form a bulwark against rising rust, fut flowers crumple and litter floor tiles. From somewhere inside, the hoarse chirping of rusting birds. From a garden in springtime, the stench of rusting jasmine rises in the night. Every day, I water my pots with filtered RO, but even so these plants, bought specifically to beautify my living room have begun to wilt. A rusted dusk is spread everywhere. Everywhere, we can hear tired, rusted sounds of the city. I too, have begun to rust and the nation… rust to rust, dust to dust. spite this, very timidly, he lives a good life An LG air-conditioner keeps him cool. He eats Kohinoor basmati rice And chapatis made of Pilsbury With bhaji made from Nutrela soya Cooked in Hommade tomato puree. Sometimes he just heats up a pre-prepared MTR packet Or tucks into an order from PizzaHut; Vada pavs are no longer nutritious. Why should he screw up his belly Gorging on bhel puri or pani puri? You could never get clean water out in the street. He only drinks Kinley’s mineral water; it’s safe Or on the rare occasion, a Diet Coke. Bland dipdip bags hardly satisfy his craving for tea,

While coffee brings on constipation. He has become conscious— Of health, wealth and brand value. He keeps getting a computerised check-up From his brain to his nails, From his heart to his kidneys, From his sputum to his stool. He has life-insurance And all sorts of policies— Householder, jewellery, Medi-claim, accidental insurance. He has every type of card— Debit, credit, shopping, parking Identity, PAN, health, ration, driving, citizenship. He has invested in Mutual Funds, a bit in PPF And NSC; he has put his money into property And has a locker in a safe deposit vault Where his wife stores all her jewellery. He specifically takes time out from his life For religious rituals and charity and When he has time (and no one’s looking) He folds his hands before God.

He takes no issue with anyone, Nor does he escalate conflicts, Nor is he in any sort of lafda. A little tense about how people regard him, but Despite this, very timidly, he lives a good life.

Translated by Mustansir Dalvi

Hemant Divate is a Marathi poet, editor, publisher, translator and poetry activist. Divate is credited with changing the Marathi literary scene through Abhidhanantar and the Indian English poetry scene through his imprint Poetrywala.

Reshma Ramesh

Shadows

You have left these shadows That I wear on my afternoon skin Like tattoos On my right thigh is a hibiscus Bleeding On the nape of my neck water Running When the night falls, they turn into Outstretched hands of poems That strangle my throat.

Silence

Silence is a slice of sea, a wall of soot, an intimate memory acquiring flesh. Silence is shallow water resting around your ankles, is the evening light burying into a swallow's nest. Silence is a kiss that hovers over a pond, wet and unfinished. Silence is an empty wing that hands out hunger To the mountains Silence is a door that opens like a book and closes like a poem.

Rajorshi Patranabis

Self potrait

I stood in front of me deciphering my features, my contours, Meticulously roved through my curves, my nose, My forehead, adorned with red vermilion, my ears sparkled in luminous studs, I looked through my belly, my feet, my lashes and my dark irises, Appreciative looks on my lips, painted pink, an epileptic wave to kiss myself, I stopped at my bosoms. They looked incomplete and incongruent with my lustrous self, I couldn't find that pear shaped red organ that complements me.. Thuds that I feel, every now and then, a beat that cries, a beat that lusts and a beat that loves was not visible..

I stood incomplete in front of me. Self portrait incomplete My mirror lies..

Remember

I look for you, this myriad spring, I hate your absence, your abstract, hapless mirage.. Asked my blooms to color your thoughts, A false wish with truest of desire..

Smelt your odor in my roses that garland my bed, Utopian anomaly, but still, a voyeur, toxic rebellion..

Asked the winds to kiss your hand, lips and forehead Remain in unison, till we meet again.. Asked the nor'wester to shake you up from within To fling your mane, shout loud and clear Remember, it's spring again, love again It's love again..

Rajorshi Patranabis is a multilingual poet and translator from Kolkata, India. He has 2 collections of English poems, 1 collection of Bangla poems and 1 book of translation. ‘Pregnant’ is his most recently published book of Sonnets.

Daya Dissanayake The colour of music, the song in a painting

i can hear i can feel i can smell and i can taste

through the four senses i can see1

Banalata Sen has been translated into English by many poets and writers, and I have struggled to find the poet Jibananda Das in any of these translations. Then I tried to translate the poem into Sinhala, my mother tongue, because I found so many words which are common in Bangla and Sinhala. Next I back translated it to English, but not the way Mark Twain did with the French translation of “Jumping Frog...”

“soft sound of dew in the evening a kite cleansing the scent of sunshine....” I was thrilled to find the synesthete in Jibananda Das, in Banalata Sen, because in Sri Lanka too we had our own synesthete, Mahagama Sekara, the poet, lyricist, artist, novelist and film director. A person who could appreciate all the true wonders of nature and share his feelings with us in so many ways. "starshine on the lake

disturbed by rain drops mingles into soft music"2 "had I been an artist

I could have created a painting of this whole world to the rhythm she heard"3 Sekara had all his senses functioning properly and probably using them better than most of us. He must have been able to see the colours of the music he listened to, or hear the music of the paintings he created. Humans express themselves through images in paintings, photography and sculpture, through movement in dance, and in speech and music. Sekara excelled in most of these forms of expression. Sekara has imparted to us some of this wonder, as we too can see the paintings he had done with his pen on paper when he wrote a poem, the visual images he created in his novel ‘Thunmanhandiya’, long before we saw the film he created from it. The film he created was itself a poem just like his novel. We also could visualize the cinematic creation in his long narrative poem, ‘Lionel Rajathileke saha Priyantha’ We can hear the songs in his prose writings in the same way. It has been called a "Union of the Senses". Scientists have a term for this, Synesthesia, because they want to fix a label to everything and try to find an explanation to everything happening around us. (Synesthesia is a perceptual condition of mixed sensations: a stimulus in one sensory modality (e.g., hearing) involuntarily elicits a sensation/experience in another modality (e.g. vision). Likewise, perception of a form (e.g., a letter) may induce an unusual perception in the same modality (e.g. a color), according to www.synesthete.org.) Vladimir Nabokov has discussed his synesthesia in his autobiography, "Speak, Memory", and it came up in "The Gift". Before him the French poet Arthur Rimbaud had referred to

"coloured vowel sounds". Much earlier, in 1818, Mary Shelly in "Frankenstein", mentions "A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time"' In "The World of the New Born", Maurer and Maurer wrote "we all begin life as synesthetes". Vassily Kandinsky had talked about "coloured hearing" and about the relationship between music and art. Amy Ion and Christopher Tyler had written that Kandinsky's paintings "have a dynamic musical feel to them" Religion can be thought of as something like the metaphoric confabulations of synesthesia, seeing nature and hearing the voice of God or the Buddha-nature in all things (Ramachandran 1998). Richard E. Cytowik, says "synesthesia is actually a normal brain function in every one of us, but that its workings reach conscious awareness in only a handful" There must have been a reason for the alphabet of the Devanagari script to be called "Varnamala", the garland of letters, which represent the universe of names and forms (Namarupa) that is speech (Shabda) and meaning (artha). This goes with the view that Sound precedes creation, that it is more ancient. Anything that moves makes sound. Feel, form, colour, taste and smell are all complex sounds. This is one way of describing what scientists call synesthesia. In the Unnabha Brahmana sutta, (Samyutta Nikaya 48.42), "There are, Brahman, these five sense-faculties... which do not share in each other's sphere of action. Mind is their resort, and it is mind that profits from their combined activity." We may have our sense organs separately feeding our brain with the different signals, but it is our mind which grasps them and in the mind the signals could mingle to give us greater perception. Synesthesia would have been the normal state of sense perception among human beings, as it probably is, among other animal beings. Today it is retained only by a few, not only in Asia but all over the world, irrespective of race or caste. But unfortunately for Jibananda Das, Bangla Sahitya and hence, Vishva Sahitya, most

critics ignored the synesthete, in their efforts to demean this great poet by trying to search for western influence in Jibananda’s creations.

This trend happened with the acceptance of the western concept of literature, abandoning our own concept of Sahitya, as we knew and accepted for over two millennia. We tried to attach labels and compartmentalise Sahitya, to fit into literature Digital technology has entered the scene with the capability to convert a painting into music, or a piece of music into a painting, and so there is 'Visual Music" today. But would machines ever be able to give us what our own minds could give us? It saddens me that I am unable to read Mahakabi Jibananda Das in his original Bangla, and English translations would never do justice to the poet or the poems. There would be many more synesthete poets writing in their mother tongue, in South Asia offering us such poems, and I hope we could get an opportunity to read about them someday. Let us try to see the elephant with all our senses, instead of by touching him with our eyes closed. When we read a novel or a poem, let us try to listen to the music it generates, or the painting that appears before our eyes. When we look at a painting let us taste it and smell the aroma. Let us enjoy all that is gifted to us by Mother Earth, using all our senses together. This will help us to appreciate the real beauty and wonder around us. 1 Dissanayake, daya. Inequality. Colombo. 2005 2 Mahagama Sekara. Prabuddha. p. 81 (my translation) 3 Mahagama Sekara. Nomiyemi p. 127. (my translation)

Daya Dissanayake is a bilingual writer, poet, critic and a student of history from Sri Lanka. daya@saadhu.com

Luz María López

Shroud

We turn our gaze (inward) where throbs go wandering through locked hallways, voices piled up in the docility of a mirrorless inertia. The existing moment is a shroud with fierce teeth. There isn’t poetry between the fingers, neither a reliquary to pray, while the night fades through the lintel of the door. There are fears so sacred! Over the couch the violets doze helplessly. Ritual dance of lethargic hours.

Eyes

eyes like drops of dew the world is now revolving in a rictus unknown to me eyes the color of light emerging from every shadow phantasmagorical omen eyes holding the salt of the universe millenarian gospels tied to the wind eyes searching for a path heartbeats rhyming on the darkest nights eyes pulsing the flood of the veins burning fiercely!

Luz María López. Puerto Rico. Author, editor, translator, anthologist, prologist, cultural promoter. President Academic Committee EMH International Book Fair in Puerto Rico. WFP Continental Director America. Kathak Literary Award 2017.

Kama Sywor Kamanda

Humanity locks down

O Eclipse of Humanity! The World locks down! Spectrums of Death! The Sun has vanished! Darkness is everywhere. The agonizing silence. What could be braver than freedom? The solar ages are suspended. How to chase away your fears and awaken your dreary anguish to put humanity in quarantine? Subtle tricks and strange plots; arise in the spheres as enigmas sowing doubts and disarray, Can they fill your soul with tears? The world without hope, dark as a ghost in the night, Resembles our deadly nightmares. Confinement, may be the dwelling of the intimate space of your being. Naive without believing it. Ignorant without imagining it. Submissive without knowing it. Ruined without wanting it. Where do you see the danger then? Safe shelters! Now you are held by ritual, fear and threat: rumors of death are waiting eagerly! Blood, sweat and tears! Pain and sacrifice. Are you less manipulated and less controlled? Are you free or adjusted? Arrogance under all the heavens breeds revolt; Move on without hope! Is it your destiny?

It feels comfortable to escape! But where? The borders are closed! Couples are intoxicated in monotony. Separated lovers languish in distress and melancholy. O forced solitudes!O solitudes imposed on humans! Overwhelming enslavements! Beliefs overflow us like pouring rains. Anger rises in you, alas! You want to live but darkness keeps vigil on the grieving spirits You hear nothing more than the reign of Order! You quit The dreams that occupy your mind clash where authority persists. Duties are more oppressing than cyclones. Resistance and servitude are opposed in a hand-to-hand war. We have reached to the invisible wars of Humanity! Do not defend yourself from your own sensitivity! A logical explanation: accept the control. Unavoidable duties, and without duties no authority. No dominance, no functioning of the brains. But without being yourself, no love under the sun, no dreams under a night of shooting stars. Leave no one the right to impose solitude on you. Forced solitudes, monitoring solitudes kill love and freedom. Do not let fear conquer you. No love without freedom to love! Your life must express your own aspirations You cannot settle down in lands with crooked truths Unjustified injustice makes even the bravest of men dread Finally, one breaks the will to clear out the brains From consciousness and mind.

Translated by Charitha Liyanage

The house of dreams

I will entwine the leaves of the tree of life With your tenderness. I will collect rainwater to quench your thirst. I will tame the fires of volcanos And the eddies of trance in my loins To bewitch you. I will harness the force of lightning and waterfalls In the chronicle of embraces To master your passions on the shores of the infinite. I will name unknown gods In manifold legends And I will hold you in my arms With strange songs. My love, my gentle companion, Think of the marvels of sharing. Dream together, dream of a shared destiny! Build a house of dreams Where love will by nourished by esteem And trust based on dialogue. I want to admire you, beloved woman! I want to reveal to you The secrets that haunt your mind, Where the days’ harmony awakens happiness. I will be your wind of madness. I will translate the frenzies of your body Until we are just one being On an enchanted journey.

Kama Sywor Kamanda is a Congolese French-speaking writer, poet, novelist, playwright, speaker, essayist and storyteller. He is also a committed intellectual who contributes to the evolution of ideas and the history of Africa.

Raja Ahmad Aminullah

Morning dew

a 20 year journey we talked of music film-noir and the writers and poets behind the iron curtain with such passion in the decades past twenty years ago accompanied by friends who wore kurta and sandals sipping black coffee at the benteng in kuala lumpur at the embankment in london at malioboro in jogja we spoke on the issues of humanity of social justice and equality of the rift between the rich and the poor of a fairer distribution of wealth of agreement and consultation of truth and justice not in a cliched way nor parroting the others how we were going to set up generate and create social justice how we were going to have a better world in between the black coffee and imam's roti canai we dreamt of obliterating corruption and injustice we spoke and continued to dream as we grew old

or aged with such speed in the midst of investment booms

and just when the skies were about to open unfolding a surreal landscape the nightmares were made visible we took positions, took sides and kept our distance and with the passing of a few moons and witness sought that commensurate with past rhetoric without the intended heroism more so when aided by experience and maturity the distance became all too obvious the valleys and gorges and the shore-less seas seemed unbridgeable is this so, my dear friends. lend your voice yet again to this struggle as before, without dilly-dally can we still sit to sip black coffee or teh tarik till the early hours of the morning?

Music of life

of creative juices flowing, ever flowing, amidst torrents of vitriol and spewers of hatreds pushing the boundaries attempting to envelope common decencies

come, let us march forth in a flotilla of peace and harmony

come, let us go let's override, the forces of derision with our powerful embrace casting aside inter and intra animosities

come, lets henceforth rent asunder tribal prejudices and communal parochialisms as after all we have committed ourselves to a universalism propelled by our belief let the music of life its rhythms its cadences it's metaphysical inflections continually remind and drive us on

Raja Ahmad Aminullah is a poet, writer, cultural activist and social critic living on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Raja Ahmad has published several volumes of poetry including " Menyarung Jiwa", Soulship, "Katakata Hati" and "ketawalah tanah airku" (laugh, my beloved country).

Jaydeep Sarangi

Rainy days

Rain disappears Coiling joyously on long wires like a rope - dancer. whichever weather rolls on gives all downpours, here or nowhere creating a land of where coy fairies descend to dance. The ship sets off on her maiden voyage. The voyagers carry their memory luggage. Everything that takes place in the dark theatre foreshadows the mysteries of nature, night’s normal acts. My ill-timed sleep breaks, secret doors howl through the night, looking for its mother.

Music at hearts

Let us press hard, and all shall see Glory of our happy Deity. All contacts are recalled, Miss calls Are called back in social malls, cafes and clubs. After this spell of hotspot. Life Has a happy turn braving the gutter. Rivers are brimming with foams of Heart’s music wakes behind the brow. Love spreads arms to embrace all Sita’s sisters are rejoicing, faithfully. All spaces are conquered, hearts healed Dalit brothers hold a map and a brush.. Love’s weather has no expiry date It runs into happy rainy hearts.

Jaydeep Sarangi is a poet and writer from Kolkata, India has eight collections in English latest being Heart Raining the Light (2020). He is a professor of English and principal at New Alipore College, Kolkata..

Lopamudra Basu Meena Alexander’s refugee lyrics: witnessing trauma in an age of insecurity

Theodor Adorno, the famous German philosopher had decreed in 1949, in his essay “Cultural Criticism and Society “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” He went on to modify his stance by arguing ““It is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it ”(312). How does this debate about poetry bearing witness to trauma play out in a post 9/11 context of retaliatory wars abroad, Islamophobia within the U.S., and more recently the genocidal Civil War in Syria with millions of Syrian refugees seeking legal residency in many European nations ? How does the deeply autobiographical nature of the lyric poem become transformed into a genre of advocacy and activism in the public sphere? What role does empathy play in this transformation of the personal lyric into a public form? How do poets avoid the pitfalls of the fetishization and appropriation of grief in their aesthetic practices and feminist politics? I will examine some of these questions by analyzing some of the later poems written by Meena Alexander, distinguished South Asian American poet who died in November 2018 after a battle with cancer.

In reading Alexander’s late poems inspired by her visit to Palestine, her responses to the genocidal war in Darfur, Sudan, and most

recently, the Syrian refugee crisis since 2015, I draw upon philosopher Kelly Oliver’s concept of “carceral humanitarianism.” Oliver draws on Hannah Arendt’s work on refugees to explain the paradox of this condition. Arendt, writing about refugees from Nazi Germany, reflects “Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings— the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”(Arendt qtd in Oliver 1). Oliver explains the shift that has occurred in the thinking on refugees by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. This is the shift from the recognition of refugees as a manifestation of a political problem to viewing them instead as symptomatic of a humanitarian crisis. Hence the solution to the problem of refugees has increasingly been left to humanitarian aid agencies who settle refugees in woefully inadequate camps and provide conditions of bare subsistence for years while refugees await consideration of their claims of asylum in the new nations that they are seeking admission in. A Alexander’s “The Task,” part of her sequence of Jerusalem Poems, is a lyrical presentation of the condition of carceral humanitarianism and the status of Palestinian refugees reduced to the condition of bare life in camps. These poems were written after Alexander visited refugee camps in Palestine in 2011. Unlike a traditional lyric, “The Task” it is not exclusively conveyed in the voice of the poet/narrator. Instead, it is dialogic, an intimate conversation between a refugee at the Balata refugee camp and the poet. The poem begins with a definition of the poet’s vocation, a task that she gave herself at the age of ten. This task is expressed by Alexander in three languages in the lyric “Ecris une tristesse, Write a sorrow/ Dukham Erutha.” These short commandments in English, French, and Malayalam encapsulate Alexander’ personal linguistic history and exposure to her mother tongue Malayalam that she never learnt to write, and her education in the colonial languages of English and French. The poem begins with the poet’s reiteration of her own vocation as a recorder of sorrows. This sense of poetic vocation is instilled within the Indian landscape with a specific reference to the neem

tree. Then in the second verse the scene shifts to the Balata Refugee Camp. The first association that the poem makes with this camp of Palestinian refugees is the ubiquity of death in the camp. In Balata Refugee Camp when someone dies No time to wash the corpse No time to weep or pray or conjure loss. Carry the body right away The camp is not only a place of death, but it is a place where death is banal and lacks the rites of grief and mourning. This image of constant death, the hurry to send off the body for burial suggests a state of continuous disease and death as a fact of refugee camp life in Balata. It also evokes the sense of what Judith Butler has described as “differential grievability” of human lives. In Frames of War, Butler comments on “the differential distribution of grievability among populations (Qtd in Craps 47). In other works, like Antigone’ Claim, Butler has pointed to the differences in our abilities to mourn certain kinds of death, like those of AIDS victims in the Reagan years in the U.S. and the continuing inability to mourn the lives of American victims of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the context of Balata and various other camps for refugees from other places, the ubiquity of death short circuits the possibility of mourning. After the mention of corpses being carried away, the lyric changes its voice from the poet persona to that of a camp resident. It is the voice of a male refugee, whose voice is rushed like the wings of the dove scraping an iron wall. It is this voice that questions the poet/ witness observer of the camp: “Too hot for you here? /Too little light?” The male camp resident asks the poet the rhetorical question of how she will find Jerusalem, “city of grief” and then asks her to sit on the bench, a gift of the U.N., near the barbed wire. The poet is instructed by her interlocuter to sit on that bench like the camp residents and “write a sorrow/ write it true” This line repeats the first couple of lines in the lyric, when the poet had articulated her first realization of her poetic vocation. The repetition at the end of the poem uttered by a refugee with a rushed voice emphasizes the urgency of the poetic task.

In reflecting on the lyric in a time of violence in an interview I conducted in 2002, Meena Alexander had analyzed her process of poetic composition: “In the composition of poetry, something that is very difficult to face is brought within the purview of language, into a zone of images, and is crystallized. And that act of crystallizing the emotion through the image actually has its own peculiar grace, which frees one, if only momentarily, of the burden of experience. . . So the lyric does have this function, it makes for transport, but draws from the ore of bodily being” (32). Alexander seems to assert the capacity of the lyric to record traumatic memory but also to provide temporary relief from the burden of trauma. This therapeutic capacity of not only the lyric but other artistic records of trauma is depicted in Alexander’s representation of refugee experience in Darfur. Unlike Balata, Alexander did not have direct access to Darfur refugees, as she could not visit Darfur after the Civil War in Sudan provoked genocidal violence. However, she was able to access drawings by refugee children of Darfur living in Chad. Two poems in the Darfur Poems section of her new volume of poetry, Atmospheric Embroidery, (2018), focus on the children’s illustrations of their traumatic memories of Darfur. Unlike the previous lyric that I discussed, “The Task,” both “Last Colors” and “A Child’s Notebook” are marked by the absence of the poetic persona. Instead, these lyrics use an ekphrastic strategy, a vivid description of the drawings made by children to bring the reader to a consciousness of the horrific nature of the genocide. In “Last Colors,” the lyric describes drawings of a woman with a scarlet face, outstretched arms, an armored truck with guns sticking out, in a profusion of flames. These images are punctuated by lines from an Arabic dictionary defining words like yatima, an orphan, hashsha, to beat down a tree and the final line which translates from the Arabic as “so the sun is overthrown.” The final image in the poem is not what the child has drawn but what the poet infers, has not been drawn, the bodily mutilation of the father, whose hands and ears have been torn and who lies in “ghost house” in Khartoum.

The Darfur poems emerging from the conditions of refugees from Sudan living in camps in Chad, also exemplify conditions of

carceral humanitarianism. The drawings were made available to Meena Alexander by members of the Human Rights Watch organization. Alexander’s task in these two poems is to faithfully reproduce the drawings, translating the visual symbols of the children to a narrative of traumatic memory. She also stiches these memories by evoking horrors that were beyond the expressive capacities of the children. Alexander allows the children’s drawings to stand on their own. She resists any urge to narrativize the stories of these children and only records the description of their drawings. There is no attempt at psychological reparation, after traumatic violence. Alexander thus refuses to turn lyric into a therapeutic form, after the writing and reading of which, the enormity of the traumatic episode can be cast aside and the work of national reintegration of the refugee in the new host country and its developed capitalist economy can go on, undeterred. The lyrics highlight the impossibility of this transition. In the structure of repetition, lyrics embody the recurrent nature of traumatic events As Sam Durrant writes while analyzing David Lloyd’s essay “ Colonial Trauma/ Postcolonial Recovery”, “ the living on of colonial trauma disrupts the therapeutic culture of postcolonial modernity” (Durrant 96). Alexander continues with the strategy of indirect representation in her poem “Refuge,” which most directly alludes to the Syrian refugee crisis. This poem was published in the Benington Review in 2017 and the narrator of the poem is Sarra Copia Sulam, a seventeenth century poet of the Jewish ghetto in Venice. The first three stanzas are a detailed diary of Sarra’s medieval life and vocation as a poet. The first two stanzas in Sarra’s voice depict the tension between her life as a devout Jewish woman and the contradictory tension pulling at her to express herself as a writer. Writing seems to be a self- inflicted bodily wound on Sarra’s skin and body, and an act conducted in secrecy. Writing is like forbidden desire, for the fulfillment of which she has stolen paper and ink from her husband’s library. She collects various exotic objects like speckled eggs, a “rut in the earth,” darkened perhaps by butcher’s animals that have bled over it. From the middle of the third stanza, the poem suddenly moves from the secretive and highly sensuous details of collecting the implements of writing to Sarra’ imaginative life. And in this imaginative transport, Sarrra swims to

Lampedusa, clinging to the fins of a dolphin. The geographical reference to Lampedusa evokes the association of this Mediterranean island with refugees who have reached it after crossing the sea in a state of precarity, sometimes in flimsy rubber boats. In her journey, Sarra encounters the body of a child who has fallen off a fishing boat and has choked, swallowing sand. The reference to the child evokes the image of Aylan Kurdi, whose dead body was washed ashore on a rocky beach in Turkey, in 2015, and gave a devastating human face to the Syrian tragedy. Sarra has lovingly unlaced the red shoes of this boy by the Mediterranean Sea. The poem ends with her wish to live with the boy in a house of wind and water. The last line asks provocatively, “Who am I?” It is interesting to ask the question why Alexander chooses the persona of Sarra Copia Sulam as the narrator of this poem. On the one hand, Sarra Copia Sulam is a female poet and this poem once again is a meditation on the meaning of the vocation of a female poet. Writing is a transgressive act, as serious as the worship of God, and it is dedicated to the remembrance of those whose deaths are unmourned and forgotten. Secondly, the identity of a Jewish poet is also significant since the Jews were among the early refugees in the twentieth century. The Holocaust creates a powerful association for contemporary refugees, who often try to use symbolic figures like Anne Frank to press for their own causes. In summer, 2017, at the Anne Frank Huis in Amsterdam, I witnessed a group of Syrians demonstrating and conducting a hunger strike to have the authorities listen to their asylum petitions. The lyric poems of Meena Alexander do no seek to appropriate the experience of the refugee child or adult. Instead, she deliberately employs a strategy of indirection to create a distance, to dilute some of the shock of traumatic experience. These defamiliarization strategies, like the use of the voice of a medieval poet to narrate the experience of Syrian children killed while trying to cross over into Europe through the Mediterranean, deliberately creates a distance between the poet and her subject matter. The question of empathy in literature has been extensively debated by Suzanne Keen in Empathy and the Novel. While reading works of literature may not translate into direct altruistic action for the refugees, the lyric poem, with its strong investment in heightened

personal emotions can certainly evoke empathy. For that empathy to translate into something more concrete as political solutions for refugees, there are several steps needed like more political actions for refugee populations to advocate for their rights. However, the lyric poem can be a catalyst at least in raising the conscience of the world to the ongoing condition of refugees and preventing the displacement of their suffering into a zone of oblivion.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. “Commitment” The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt. New York: Continuum, 1997. 300-319. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press, 1998. Basu, Lopamudra. “The Poet in the Public Sphere: A Conversation with Meena Alexander. New York City, January, 2002. Social Text (2002) 20.3, 31-38. Alexander, Meena. ““Last Colors.”: Atmospheric Embroidery. Gurgaon : Hatchette India, 2015. ---. “Refuge” Benington Review3 (2017). ---. “The Task” Impossible Grace: Jerusalem Poems, Center for Jerusalem Studies, Al Quds University, 2012 Durrant, Sam. “Undoing Sovereignty: Towards a Theory of Critical Mourning” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism . Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2014. 91-111. Print Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Oliver, Kelly. Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Lopamudra Basu is Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stout. She is the author of Ayad Akhtar, the American Nation and Its Others After 9/11; Homeland Insecurity (December, 2018).

Ibrahim Al-Masri

Those we waited for

Those we waited for in train stations have not arrived nor those we waited for in front of arrival halls in airports nor those we waited for in bus stops nor those who said they would come on foot or in old carriages pulled by empty-stomach horses in whose eyes we see the pain as arches coated by dense dust while we wait with strained shoulders and hardened necks, as the basalt is pointed rock, with poetry blinding us from seeing that we are too old all along there is a cave crowded with pictures of adventurers who left and never returned nor had their photos saved on our mobiles with a glow that saves embers in our eyes and in the pictures that have recently survived drowning No arrival of those we waited on wharves or on cinema screens those who come back as heroes after they have carried over, instead of us, the burden of fighting on maps edges and spilled blood that was beams of light burn out with the pace of steps going far, far away then night darkens as we are accustomed to with great ideas Those ideas we hoped the first of arrivers would tell us about But he has not arrived nor those who went and never returned from ideas, whether they were trivial or great.

Translated by Abd al-Rahman Yusef

Time

Time is what we have added by the spoon to cups of tea as if we are going soon to work or to the war. And in the pleasures sought only by old penitents, the miracle will shine as if it were a golden earring under a dim-light bulb Then, the shadow will not be submerged by interesting clouds unless softness finds its last resort in your drowse Of course, it is worthwhile for humans to dance with their shadows while cups of tea have slipped one after the other from this paradise of sins O god of pain, we suffered already We lived long lives which we put in boxes now as if we are going to entrust them to mothers sitting lazily before houses their eyes are swollen with old tears Tears that were held till sons begin complaining My mother says that her handkerchief, sunk in sweetness, was found when her son writes a poem afterwards he never feels regret.

Translated by Abd al-Rahman Yusef

Ibrahim Al-Masri was born in Egypt. He is a poet and journalist. He wrote more than thirty books that vary between poetry, novels and press work trips. He has published 17 poetry books, and shared in several poetry events and festivals, whether Egyptian, Arab or International.

Ali Al- Shalah

Live

A The father has died the son has died and the home has died.

B

The water has died The grass died The voice died So when will death itself die?

Oh God

Two hectares of Islam and three tons of Christianity, oh God, this freedom is elusive. My body stares into the future and my soul lives in the past. This freedom is elusive, I am breathing an air of madness, the inhalation is the living and exhalation is the dead.

Thieves are stealing the horizon from divine words. I drag the horizon in this desert behind me to return it to its sacred verse, then I try to tie the two banks with my tears. Oh God, love equals fraud, the woman I love is the woman I betray.

Oh God, we must support the uprising of dictionaries: the Prophets have departed, there are no more messengers after today God remains an only One, so the rabbis, sheikhs and priests, how did they become Gods? Not a sinner after today, they are all Gods. Oh God, How will we mend this? Police live in languages, shooting their guns at the present-tense verbs, they build their camps in the genitive. Oh God, how do we build a poem without the freedom of language? My language is a prison dreaming of another prison. A Questions then: why would the minaret call to prayer if the ears are deaf?

Oh God Oh God

Dr. Ali Al- Shalah Born in Babylon, Hilla, Iraq. He studied in Babylon, Baghdad and Amman. PhD in Modern Literature from the University of Bern, Switzerland. He has published eight poetry books and five on criticism. He Headed the Culture and Information Committee in the Iraqi Parliament, 2010-2014. Head of Babylon Festival for International Cultures and Arts 2011-2020

María de los Ángeles Camacho Rivas

Lovers

It is not due to carelessness: the shirt on the floor, the sweet chaos of rolling hems, fibers like a rainbow, uninhabited buttonholes, upside down buttons, the black vapour of lingerie like an umbrella over the sandals. Love is a wet beginning, a turned off phone, eyelashes close together in a line, a Sunday without horns, a bit of a dynamited daydream. Summary: floor, pants, wrinkles, a little bird buckle, lamp trimmed with a flaccid pair of socks in the nudity that burns them.

The particle of God

They tell that at the awakening she unrolled her legs. They tell that she brought her heart in her hands and took the opportunity to observe it; she caressed those simile-kidnapping sad beats. They tell that the particles of a noble science overpopulated her soul. They tell she was reunited with her smile. They tell there were sighing bursts like those of her fifteenth-birthday fireflies. They tell that she was sleeping

and, as she rubbed her eyes, the ties got undone. She tells that as she opened her heart she gave birth to a Universe with the man's name she would repeat since that moment, forever.

María de los Ángeles Camacho Rivas is a poet from Patillas Puerto Rico. She published the collection of poems ¨Días de bromelias¨ in 2011, compiled and edited the student’s poetry anthologies ¨Salmo de un esclavo¨ (2014) and ¨Décimas de 9¨ (2017) and her second book of poems ¨Con mi jirafa azul¨ (2015). It is part of the board of the International Poetry Festival in Puerto Rico and member of Guajana, a poetry group founded in 1960.

Sudeep Sen

The Pandemic Sequence

there is nothing you don't devour — Pablo Neruda

In the mirror it's Sunday in the dream there will be sleeping, the mouth speaks the truth. —Paul Celan ‘Corona’

Saline drip

Sweat beads trickle from my forehead threading through my dense eyebrows, over the protective arch of lids and lashes into my unsuspecting eyes. My vision is awash in a fuzzy saline glare, its sting fiercer than the viral load. Perspiration transforms into tear drops — such is the potency of salt water — brackish, transparent, intimate, deathly.

Love in the time of corona

I don’t believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him. ― GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ, Love in the Time of Cholera

In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.

― BERTOLT BRECHT

1. Faint indigo tints in the greys of your hair evoke memory — Krishna’s love for Radha,

its perennial longevity, its sustained mythology, its blue-bathed lore — such are life’s enduring parallels. Fourteen years — yet my heart flutters infatuated like first love. My hands fidgety, palms sweaty, pulse too fast to pick — I am not allowed to touch your face.

Cyber-flurry emoji-love cannot assuage fears — or corona’s comatose cries. I don’t believe in God.

2. In thousands, migrant workers march home — hungry footsteps on empty highways accentuate an irony — ‘social distancing’, a privilege only powerful can afford. Cretins spray bleach on unprotected poor, clap, bang plates, ring bells, blow conches, light fires to rid the voodoo — karuna’s karma, infected. Mood-swings in sanitised quarantine — selfisolation, imposed — uncontained virus, viral. When shall we sing our dream’s epiphanies?

3. City weather fluctuates promiscuously mapping temperature’s bipolar graph — tropic’s air-conditioner chill, winter’s unseasonal hailstorm, sky’s pink-blue spring. Blue-grey will moult into salt-and-pepper, ash-grey to silver-white, then to aged-white. My lungs heave, slow-grating metallic-crackles struggle to escape the filigreed windpipes —

I persist in my prayers. I’m afraid of Him. Hope, heed, heal — our song, in present tense.

Obituary

They were not simply names on a list.

They were us.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

Death knells peal, numbers multiply, virus ravages us, one by one. Newspaper columns loom, unsteady ghostly apparitions on broadsheets — name, age, date of death — tall epitaphs in fine print. Ink spills, bleeds dark — newsprint blotting out our wheezing breath. No amount of hygiene-ritual enables our lungs to resuscitate. Our lives — micro point-size fonts on an ever inflating pandemic list — black specks, fugitive lonely numbers — the deceased, on an official roster. Another sick, another dying, another dead — yes, they were us.

Mohammad Nurul Huda

‘Bidrohi’: An aesthetic charter of human emancipation

Though there are critics who tend to agree that poets are not entirely discovered in their works, poets are not altogether missing whose living and writing are almost identical. Kazi Nazrul Islam seems to be one of those rare creators who stimulated their moments in every possible way to write the desired lines that could portray the essence of the life they lived along with suggestions of rectifying or purifying their life-pattern in a desired manner. And this process may be exercised with aesthetic validity to an agreeable extent without being cent percent didactic. Verily known as the Rebel Poet of Bengal immediately after publication of his towering poem ‘Bidrohi’, where he proclaimed the independence of his own self, finally analogous with individual liberty and collective freedom of the nation called Bangali, Nazrul’s ultimate destination was an admixture of love, justice and liberty of humanity, as applicable to defined nations with their diversified identities as well as a cumulative integrity in the wider perspective of mankind. This is how the individual ‘I’ of Kazi Nazrul Islam became a universal ‘I’ symbolizing his nation and mankind across the globe belonging to no particular bend of time. Nazrul’s physical birth took place on May 25, 1899 in Churulia, West Bengal, India. He was born to the wedlock of Kazi Fakir

Ahmed and Zaheda Khatun. His not-so-long-life that he lived in some five phases had almost direct interaction with his creativity. The first phase was his boyhood, rather Leto period till he entered the Bangali Paltan before he crossed his teens; the second phase was his brief stay in Karachi as a soldier; the third phase was his tumultuous days of revolt and literary creations in prose, poetry, songs and what not; the fourth was his attachment with Gramophone Company in Calcutta and his growth into an undying lyric writer and musician; and the concluding phase was his proverbial silence for nearly thirty four years from 1942 to 1976, the year he made his final journey to eternity. Nazrul wrote abundantly and profusely in almost all genres known to him. Though his first published work was a story claiming that ‘my beauty first came as a tale’, soon he started writing furious lines in verse and rose to the status of an eternal rebellious soul, who was considered to be a most wanted enemy of the then British colonizers. This is the reason why he was put behind the bars in his early twenties. Eventually he was freed and all the good souls of Bengal including Rabindranath Tagore accorded him hearty reception. He was declared as the National Poet of the undivided Bangali nation in the year 1929. This is indeed an unprecedented recognition to a young poet. A most non-communal soul Bengal has ever witnessed, Nazrul translated his beliefs into reality getting wedded to Pramilla Nazrul, who was a Brahmo in belief. He fell in love with Nargis, but the wedding did not take place, for which he suffered for long and created some outstanding love poems in Bengali. It revalidates our assumption that no vibrant moment of his conscious life remained inert, lifeless and unproductive. Nazul’s proverbial revolt produced, undeniably, the fiercest lines and poems, most of which are compiled in ‘Ognibina’, ‘Bisher Banshi’, ‘Bhangar Gan’, ‘Samyabadi’, ’Jinjir’, ‘Proloy Shikha’. ‘Julfiqar’ etc and other published titles that ran to more than seventy-five. Finally he wanted an independent land for the Bangalis in particular and it was clearly manifested in his article ‘Bangalir Bangla’. This article also outlined the armed struggle against the occupation forces of all kinds: colonizers and neo-colonizers and their native collaborators. Thus it is somewhat

identical with our liberation war leading to the birth of an independent nation-state. Hence Nazrul, the rebel, is also the dreamer of liberated Bangladesh. This explains why Kazi Nazrul Islam has finally earned his identity as the National Poet of Bangladesh. In fact, his life and creativity not only ran as two parallel currents, but also interacted rewardingly to shape in him a secular icon of human emancipation. He rightly proclaimed at the very outset of his creative career, ‘Hail valiant, / Hail, ever elevated is my head’ in his poem ‘Bidrohi’. Nazrul remained true to this hyperbolic assertion of human strength throughout his conscious life. It is to be carefully noted that this heroic proclamation came at the second phase of his life. Looked from this angle, ‘Bidrohi’ is the manifesto of his all-out creative endeavors by dint of which he pledged to free the self and the other from exploitation and deprivation of any kind. 2. 2021 is the year of the 100th anniversary of the composition of ‘Bidrohi’, an unrivalled historic poem of aesthetic excellence, advocating human emancipation and making him famous almost overnight. He wrote the poem in the last week of 1921, then aged about 22, waking up a whole night in a rented residence of his friend Comrade Muzaffar Ahmed, then living in Taltala lane, Calcutta. In fact, a creative miracle took place as soon as the poem was drafted and finalized for publication. No other poem in the history of Bengali language, not to speak of other languages beyond our perception, made so quick, diverse, turbulent and enduring repercussions among its readers who were also divided into opposing groups of its supporters and refuters. Easiest to identify as opponents were ruling British colonizers who deemed it an unfailing blow to their political existence in the subcontinent, whereas others were mainly fundamentalists and religious fanatics who discovered in it the poet’s blasphemy for laying footprints on Bhagawan’s chest, plus his envious literary opponents who brought the ludicrous allegation of plagiarism, imitation and lack of integrity of its message and stylistics taken together. On the contrary, common people, freedom loving patriots, poets and

literary critics with an insightful, progressive and penetrative look including persons no less than Rabindranath Tagore, Comrade Muzaffar Ahmed, Netaji Subhas Bose, Acharya Profulla Chandra Roy and others acknowledged it as a new poetic text, that captured the minds of millions of readers without delay. That acceptability of ‘Bidrohi’ has been multiplying at an increasing pace in the nine decades passed so far. Immediately after its publication, it appeared in more than one literary journal and almost 29000 copies of two consecutive reprints of ‘Bijli’, the weekly magazine where the poem first came out, were sold, such an incident being unprecedented in Bengal’s literary history. A similar occurrence has not repeated in the last 99 years or so. Nazrul himself was least interested whether his work would stand the test of time or not, but now we see an entirely opposite scenario of its survival as an innovated literary text of extraordinary quality based on the theory of defamiliarization, mostly applied to unorthodox creative texts exploring new possibilities of balanced interplay of form and content. This is somewhat postmodern in nature. Evidently, the year 1921 did not witness the trends of a postmodern poem having its fragmented text, open-ended structure, interconnecting of diverse myths and allusions, inter-textuality of confronting ideas, overlapping of polyphonic voice, juxtaposition of opposites or seemingly schizophrenic utterances along with interplay of varying moods from diverse origins and spheres. But a highly receptive and analytical mind as well as unbiased common masses targeting their individual and collective freedom found reasons for easy and instantaneous response to the message, melody, fury, dance and music of this artifact. In fact, this is a superb creation of wild poetic imagination striking a rare interaction of what Eliot called auditory imagination and visual imagination. The music of this text was created by uneven lines of unconventional metrical arrangement suitable to the whirl dance of its central character ‘Shiva’, a metaphor for the supreme deity of destruction and creation as per Hindu mythology. More than 100 ‘I’s that the poet utters in his 142-line poem (original version is longer) is an expression of this protagonist who can assume any form of tangible and intangible nature anywhere in

this unending universe. Nazrul not only equated an individual with this supreme deity, but also declared him as one who is able to surpass deity or divine power. This is an assertion of a superman with immense ability and self-sufficiency in a most hyperbolic manner hitherto unthought-of. While referring to this hyperbole, which is clearly pronounced in the very starting imagery of the poem (Himalayan peak bowing to an individual), we are tempted to mention that Nazrul manifested his astounding capability of employing word-plays, oxymoron, similes, imageries, metaphors, symbols, allusions, hearsay, myths, conceits, confessions and other rhetorical devices from diverse sources to establish the signification he intended to germinate in his created text as a conscious creator with an aesthetic awareness of his kind. In doing so he was directly and indirectly indebted to many of his known and unknown sources of prior art and resource persons including Satish Chandra Kanjilal, Nibaran Chandra Ghatak, Chokor Goda, Bajle Karim, leto songs, religious scriptures, Vedic literature, fables, legends, traditional cultural expressions from diverse regions, Whitman, Shelley, Rabindranath, Mohitlal, Kemal Ataturk, Mehmet Akif, Hafiz, Khayyam, Rumi, Jami, Iqbal, to mention a few. In fact, the moment he was drafting the text, an unending procession of heterogeneous images of seemingly interactive nature were being downloaded incessantly, as if it was a kind of turbulent ‘emotion recollected in tranquility’, carried over by ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’. He was just wreathing the best words and images into best order. The outcome was, indeed, amazing. As soon as we attempt to dig into the text line by line we are swept away by its unshakable grasp so that we are in a position to willfully suspend any disbelief lurking within us. Although Nazrul was overtaken by the fullest creative ecstasy one can imagine, he could consciously enable himself to edit and re-edit the images appropriate to his textual integrity and contextual diversity. This is indeed a rare occasion of poetic process that confronts a practicing poet not so often. One cannot grasp it immediately. Nazrul’s success lies in his ability to get command on it as well as to implement it into credible and

suggestive images in a synchronized musical outfit without waiting for an artistic distance. The logic behind this success largely lies in the fact that he was overwhelmingly involved in what he thought and produced, caring less for the theory of impersonality in an intangible creative pursuit. His lines are centrifugal in nature resembling the sudden explosion of a grenade, but his target is absolutely centripetal to win the multiple shades of freedom he has aimed at. It is no wonder that the poetic process of this soldier-poet may also be interpreted from a war strategist’s point of view quite seriously. Undeniably, Nazrul is a romantic poet of highest order who has excelled in fusing a note of high seriousness, an element that renders a work truly great according to Victorian poet-critic Matthew Arnold. The 99 years of ‘Bidrohi’, people’s ever increasing interest in its existing text and a huge corpus of critical analysis on its artistic viability, although mostly in Bengali, has proved that it is by far a great poem of epic maturity, having no parallel of its kind in the twentieth century. A distant comparison may be suggested with a poem of altogether different structural making entitled ‘The Second Coming’ (W. B. Yeats) where the very first paragraph is also suggestive of an anarchical situation of human civilization with centrifugal forces shaking far away from an envisioned centre, the controlling powers of this chaotic universe. Yeats refers to the protagonist, a vast image of horror and terror, in the symbol of ‘Spiritus Mundi’, - half-man and half-beast-- who moves towards the seat of divinity with an ominous intention. In a changed situation, Nazrul refers to such an oppressive and ominous symbol which must be defeated by positive human force. A closer comparison between the two texts would reveal more similarities and differences of diverse interests. Both the poems were written in the year 1921 as aftermath of world war first. One obvious difference is that Yeats describes the situation in highly selective words producing an integrated text of 22 lines with no prescriptive suggestion whatsoever; on the contrary, ‘Bidrohi’ is a long elaborative text of 142 turbulent and clashing lines with remedial nature. ‘The Second Coming’ ends with a question whereas

‘Bidrohi’ ends with an answer that his war will not end till the forces of tyranny are completely defeated and annihilated. Enduring peace with liberty, justice and love is the ultimate destination of Nazrul’s revolt. This is what can be termed as the unambiguous voice of human unity and liberty across time and space. However, much more is needed to be said and done on this aspect. Hopefully, new aesthetic investigation into his poetic process would be set in motion by his successors in the upcoming years targeting at newer findings. One remark I am tempted to make on its translation (into English primarily, then other languages) into international languages and response coming from readers and critics from other cultures and creative backdrops. Now there are some interpretative English translations of this poem in free verse or prose, without attempting to reproduce the musical equivalence in parallel metrical order and alliterative rhyme, which seems almost impossible. However, the humble attempt made by the native translators has been able to present the aesthetic and subjective force of this poem to its foreign readers. The reason largely lies in the fact that rhetorical devices based on visual imagination and meaning of the text of this work were well thought and clearly organized by the poet and these could be meaningfully reproduced from source language (Bengali) to target language (English or another foreign language). An English poet with required aesthetic competence and aptitude is expected to create a better text in English. However, existing English renderings have proved that ‘Bidrohi’ or ‘The Rebel’ is worthy of being read and acclaimed worldwide as a significant poem of the twentieth century and beyond. The nation found in ‘Bidrohi’ the voice they have been looking for ages together. It looked like a universal charter of freedom for the colonized people of the then subcontinent as well as all-out emancipation of the mankind as a whole. This was later defined as ‘struggle for human wholeness’ by Professor Langley, during the centennial celebrations of Nazrul’s birth in 1999-2000. We are tempted to identify various shades of this freedom: freedom of poetic idiom, prosody, music, rhetoric, form etc; freedom of an

individual, a nation as well as universal humanity. The local and universal message of human emancipation and global oneness has made this poem as well as its creator a champion of human rights for all times to come. Let us pay glowing tribute to this undying phenomenon of creative fidelity belonging to our time and perception.

Mohammad Nurul Huda was born in Bangladesh. Huda is a renowned poet, critic, translator, IPR specialist, folklorist, novelist and cultural activist. He has so far published more than 100 titles in prose and poetry. He has been honoured with many awards including SAARC Literature Prize (New Delhi, 2019), Ekushey Padak (2015, Highest Civilian Honour in Bangladesh), Bangla Academy Literary Award (1988).

Tulasi Diwasa

Water Samadhi of light

Owl As if waking suddenly Over the branch of night Hiding black rosy dreams Of the yellow sunset Well before the red sunrise, Opened the dilating meditative but piercing eyes And Smearing unpolluted red soil1 Of the fresh light Descending slowly from snowy peaks To the meadows and low hills And to the countryside Shaking off the residue of sleep with wings From the wood of the dark Untiring singer of the warbling light Drew the wild rooster closer And said loudly in his ear-'Light in darkness! Light in darkness! You can no longer sing like this The eternal song of the sun--

Sun can not be there all the time It can not spread everywhere Can not lodge with everyone Can not be important to all In the same way Listen, I'm saying this to you!' Burnt at once In this narrative

With the radiant amber Of the resolute truth Awakened in the darkness before time Like the pure but little blemished light From the blazing sky of the epic, The rooster Cutting with the sharp beak of his own pen Pulled the sun suddenly From out of his own Everlasting epic saga Unendingly written And threw it out To some other boundless horizon again Shocked by the electric charge Of this sudden Unthinkable but Actual incident The owl closed his eyes even in the dark And said to the rooster With all humility -"Oh dark-throated one You who drink up all the black poison Of the darkness I see You are unbound Mahakala Though tied with the rope of time You are not one who only writes poems But also a great epic poet Who lives it out in life!'

On the other side, At this moment of time The rooster was staring With unblinking eyes Helplessly At the defenceless sun

He'd thrown himself earlier Into the sky Into the fathomless sea of darkness, Drowning and floating, To tell the truth The sun cut off from his own sky Had long drowned into the night Exhausted from swimming!

Translated by Abhi Subedi

Dr. Tulasi Diwasa is a prominent modernist Nepali poet who belongs to the group of those poets who introduced experiments, new idioms and novelty in the mode of expression in the very discourse structure of poetry in Nepali in the sixties and seventies.

Yuri Zambrano

At the end of the alleyway

(Replying 302) Labyrinthing inside 302

Upside down, the universe is easy to understand. The stairways to the temple constitute the railway of a flying train leading to the tower of our paradise.

On the stones Four steps challenge the moonlight Kisses

Sights

Hearts burning

The seashore is the echo The echo opens our hearts with the master key am inside your eyes making the unforgettable trip searching your soul finding your essence INTO an unavoidable collision.

Big wild-bites

Exploring the core of shrapnel shots, with a bit of luck a sea of calm will span the dawn.

With arbitrarily feline little streaks a cumulus of pink clouds are warning me about your jaws on my skin whilst I am rending in pregnancy-labor pains for your kisses. Last night I took out of my magic top hat the best of my caresses I put them on your face I filled my fingertips with fire strolling on your back until crack you each vertebra at the tip of my wild bites ... while I was spraying your pubis with my bullets!

Dr Yuri Zambrano is an activist writer, editor, novelist, essayist, story-teller and director of the World Festival of Poetry (WFP). He is also main coordinator of the World Poetry Front for Defending Women Rights (WM). He has published since 1980’s decade, over 50 books in different languages, among literary texts and scientific books about brain behaviour and consciousness.

Naida Mujkić

Revelation

The first day of autumn my father's friend accidentally revealed an old grave in his yard. Nameless female grave - moon and stars Carved in white stone. Below, A little deeper in the ground he found a few bones too, shoulder blades, knee parts. I looked at my father as he descended A bucket of cream on the table under the grapes. It was soiled with earth; I took it And I started to take off black crumbs with my fingertips. A little further dry stalks of corn Trembled as the sun set behind the clouds And a shadow hung over our garden. The more I wiped the bucket the darker the Garden became. The wind blew.

It suddenly occurred to me that this unknown woman Whose bones were now stacked in a bucket doesn’t want to be Here, among us, who carelessly eat grapes. Put the bucket down you will soil your dress, my father said. And truly when I looked at my dress dirt was already there Glued on the folds at the bottom.

I shook my dress, then blew into the bucket Before I put it back on the table. The sun shone on the garden again. And the wind stopped. The cats clung to my legs as if they wanted to say that everything was over long ago anyway.

Midsummer

When I was a child my grandfather used to tell me About the women who came to look

Their dead husbands in our hills. But how did they know were to look For them, Grandpa wondered, No one escaped from our hills. It's a midsummer. I ride my bike along the river Far from our hills. Old woman crouches by the road. Ivy grows from her face And she cries in them, she wipes her nose With the edge of a black scarf. The pigs broke the boards on the chicken coop, alas! And every night the fox takes one hen. Damn life, alas! It is not damn, if you have a pair of nails, I say. She has nails, she has them somewhere But there is no hammer.

She was happy for fifty years. And her husband was always there next to her, in the house, In the garden, loneliness was more bearable with him. And now, now everything is gone. And what will happen It is not known. If only her father had died on that hill, Looking at the sky, like all the other men in the village. She wouldn't be here, prisoner of the field, Whose language she does not understand. Years and years - of broken ribs.

I wanted to hug her, but her sadness stood between us. And I just sat down On my bike and slammed hard into another chaos.

Dr Naida Mujkic published 6 books of poetry. She participated in several international poetry festivals. She received her PhD from the Faculty of Philosophy, and she teaches literature for many years at University. She was born and lives in Bosnia and Herzegowina.

Satkarni Ghosh

Opaque glass

A storm has come and I call it a universal terror I know that there is no way of escape But it we live carefully We may save our lives The politicians are playing with it Which darkness they want to cover? Which way they want to divert the direction of the storm? Seeing themselves complacent in the mirror they think others are equally well and taking their daily meal joyffully Alas, they don't know a broken man is continually searching for fuel to ignite his oven

War-game

The fight with myself has grown interesting Dust is getting thicker in this war The smooth face and the endless sorrow are mixing agony with the dust one night passes and a war starts In one war hands are lost legs in another war and when eyes are lost The whole world suddenly turns dark Still the war in going on even when the bodies are injured The wailing of the people is making a drum like sound in the air All the birds are crying in fear But flowers will laugh again at the advent of Spring Translated by Sujit Sarkar

Satkarni Ghosh is a poet from Hawra, Kolkata India is the editor of Saranga literary magazine and Kolkatar Jishu an international poetry magazine. He is the secretary of Howrah kabita utsav West Bengal. Recipient of few awards. He has nineteen poetry collection, 3 english translated books and 13 edited books.

Ahmed Tahsin Shams

There is no…but…

[Moon-light moves keeping pace with two figures walking in a desert] "What do you want?" a tyrannical tone knocks. "Why would I tell you?" shrugs the wanderer. "Whom to, then?" the grumpy says leaning back, putting one leg on the other, resting his elbows and buttock on his air-throne. It sure isn't a question. "Do you even have any other job rather than irritating passers-by?" negligence oozes out of wanderer's eyes. "So you consider trespassers and passers-by synonymous?" shaking his tummy scoffs Mr. King. "Is it your land?" laxity slides aside and eagerness shows up in the wanderer's eyes as if clouds making way for the moon. "Whose else, aye?" with poise the Authority throws an Apple he had started chewing before the Big Bang. "Should I leave?" the wanderer wonders. "Didn't you like it?" dances one of the Lord's brows. "Does it matter?" the wanderer turns around. "Who are you?" Owner's question pours as much curiosity as it could breed. "I'm a trespasser, aren't I?" smirks the wanderer. "What made you visit my land?" the Confused murmurs. "Can't I visit for Nothing?" the wanderer asks back aloud from far. "What is nothing?" frowns the One. [Clouds gradually wrap in the moon.] "What are you made of?" the Loner hears this, and no more.

Sajek-ki-sajish

His life -- not a Rampal project! His coal life turned cold, but sheuli, kashphul, orchids bloomed when he first met his Green at Sajek-ki-Sajish! Sundarbans resembled her. He won’t let any Ram or Pal to corrupt that greeny-smile! Groves, at times, become rude, as goddess do. Even if it hurts, we bow. He also knows water can make one drown,

but without it, one might get choked in! “What a fragrant grove,” he whispered. The verses of the film ‘Perfume: The Story of a Murderer’ haunts: “There was only one thing the perfume could not do. It could not turn him into a person who could love and be loved like everyone else.” He literally prayed to his small-lettered gods: water, leaves, the sky, and the air, pleaded to allow him a walk in her green. And thus -- - be entwined, in all rains and sun shines.

Ahmed Tahsin Shams is an academic, film-maker and communication consultant. He works at Notre Dame University Bangladesh. His debut poetry book named Theo 101 was published by Antivirus Publication (Liverpool, England) in 2015.

Germain Droogenbroodt The wisdom of unspoken words

How Celan's Poems inspired me Although born in the Flemish part of Belgium where Dutch is the official language, as a youngster it was not the Flemish nor the Dutch poetry that fascinated me, but the French, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud… and even more the German. Initially the romantics and later Hölderlin, Rilke, as well as the East German poets Peter Huchel, Reiner Kunze. Years later, in the early eighties, I read in a German literary magazine Todesfuge (Fugue of Death) by Paul Celan. The language and the style of the poetry were totally new and impressed me greatly. The poem not only describes realistically the terrible event, the killing of the Jews by the Nazis, but leaves the reader freedom of interpretation. The rhythm, the repetition of “we drink” makes the poem even more dramatic: Dark milk of daybreak we drink it in the evening, we drink it at noon and in the morning, we drink it at night, we drink and we drink. In the original German version, the verses sound even more melodious, but the musicality of the poem does not reduce the horror, the drama, on the contrary it increases it. That poem incited me to read more poetry by that Jewish poet, born as Paul Antschel or Anczel 1920 in Czernowiz, Bukovina. His parents had been killed by the Nazis and he had been forced to work in a labour camp till it was dissolved in 1944.

Fuge of Death, written in Bucharest in 1945, is probably his most famous poem, published for the first time in The Romanian periodical Contemporanul, Bucharest 2.5.1947 entitled "Tangoul mortii" (Tango of Death), translated in Romanian by his Bucharest friend Petre Solomon, the poem was included in his first poetry book Der Sand aus den Urnen (The Sand of the Urns) published in Vienna in 1948, but withdrawn by the poet because of many misprints. His second book Mohn und Gedächtnis (Poppy and Memory), published 1952 in Germany by the well-known German publisher Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, contained as well Fugue of Death, the new title of the poem, but also Corona, Zähle die Mandeln (Count the Almonds) and other fascinating poems, in German poetry a completely new tone, call it, so typical for Celan’s style the poetic expression of Sprachlosigkeit, speechlessness, a style which characterizes Celan's complete poetic oeuvre: the expression of what can’t be said, leaving each individual reader to unravel the unspoken which can be understood in several ways. The language remains fundamental, personal, although she had to pass through her own perplexity, the darkness, the horror. (Paul Celan spent most of his life in Paris and was also a very active translator. He translated works of Arthur Rimbaud, Guillaume Apollinaire, Henri Michaux, René Char, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shakespeare as well as the Russians poets like Alexander Blok, Ossip Mandelstam and other poets.) "Much of Celan's later poetry can be intuitively grasped, but not rendered in another language, without as much knowledge as possible of his sources" pretends correctly Michael Hamburger who translated a ample selection of Celan's poem, published by Penguin Books. I also translated a few poems of Celan, but his language is so personal that many of his poems cannot be rendered correctly in another language. Celan had seen death with his own eyes, anguish, darkness and the stigma of death accompanied him all his life, present in many of his poems, as he writes in the last verses of a poem from Mohn und Gedächtnis, his first poetry collection published in Germany "Count the almonds, / count, what was bitter and kept you awake, / count me among

them... the death layed the arm around you, and the three of you walked through the evening. He committed suicide by drowning in the Seine in April 1970.

The unspoken: a source of inspiration My first poetry books, "Forty at the Wall", "Palpable Absence" and "Do you know the Country? Meditations at Lake Como", considered neo-romantic by literary critics, were slightly influenced by German nature poets, but after having visited many times the Far East, having discovered and studied Asian philosophies, starting with "The Road", written in India and translated into Chinese as TAO, my poetry made a big change and became more philosophic. Taoist, pretend the Chinese, or ZEN according to the Japanese. Where nature poetry is descriptive, influenced by the surroundings, philosophical poetry is a reality to be discovered. Paul Celan described it perfectly: Wirklichkeit ist nicht./Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein" (Reality does not exist, reality wants to be searched and gained). The Spanish poet José Ángel Valente who also translated in Spanish a number of Celan's poems claimed "As a multiplier of feelings the poem surpasses all possible feelings". However, the poems should not show itself to the reader undressed and nude, it should - as it is in Celan's poetry - conserve what constitutes poetry: the fascination of the enigma. Contrary to Celan, I try to write a kind of poetry which is, apparently, simple, but profound. However, the change from descriptive to more philosophical poetry, to find a "new reality", requires a free mind, I therefore have to leave my "normal" daily life, find a place without people and other elements, such as noise, TV, smartphone, things which distract the spirit, the thinking, inspiration: obstructing the arrival of the word at the white, the empty paper. Because Paul Celan's poetry leaves that freedom of personal interpretation, wherever I go to write, I always carry with me his books. Although my poetry is completely different from Celan's, through the years, as much as eleven poems refer in some or other way to his verses. The poem "Nighthorn" dedicated to Paul Celan, published in "Do you know the Country?" refers to his suicide as does the poem "As one knows..." from "Conversation with the

Hereafter". The poem "Thorn or Rose " refers to his poem Mandorla and to Celan's life, full of dramatic events which deeply influenced his life and his poetry: the killing of his parents, death of his first child shortly after its birth, his complicated love affair with the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann and last but not least the claims of plagiarism by the widow of the poet Yvan Goll, resulting in a press campaign, leaving deep scars in Celan's psyche, the sense of life. "When my Lip bleeds by the Language" clearly refers to Celan's very personal poetry, full of neologisms, unusual words and expressions. The poem "Morning Star" with a verse of Paul Celan "Oh Flower of Time" inspired me for the title of my latest publish poetry book "The Ephemeral Flower of Time" whereas the poem "Don't count me among the Almonds" , selected from my latest, not yet published book "The Unrest of the Word" is a poetic response to Celan's verses "Make me bitter, count me with the almonds" as is "Mandorla". The misleading speeches of some demagogue politicians concerning the corona virus, resulting to the death of hundred thousand of people, as did Hitler's agitating speeches, reminded and inspired me to "Fugue of Death" one of my recent poems.

Poems referring to Paul Celan’s poetry

(English translation in collaboration with Stanley Barkan)

Nighttime

at the eastern window the tiny wandering figure of emotion now appears to him —Paul Celan

Along the branches of the trees darkness ascends now, and the evening, dying a thousand deaths condenses into night adorning with its black veil the twinkling light, the shards of the day.

At the window of my room as a vain beacon burns— the electric light. from: “Palpable Absence”

Nighthorn

for Paul Celan Full moon strangling light on the black water of the lake magic circle where mosquitoes dance the ghosts of deceased poets following the nighthorn’s call lost in the haze. From “Do you know the Country?, Meditations at Lake Como”

As one knows…

When the night wrecked its forest . . . Paul Celan

As one knows an underground river isn’t visible but is still there so he knows how the defenseless body leaks out its life and destroys itself —exactly at this moment when life seems easier than ever before.

Thorn or Rose

Everything is in the mandorla Paul Celan Twilight displaces the borders of light invisible now the stumbling stone thorn of rose gables the night

with driftwood and shells charcoal glows in the heart reading with caressing fingers the yellowed images of olden days From: “The Dewdrops of Dawn”, Poems 1984-2012

Voice

A voice, out of which you take the drink. Paul Celan Star-drinking the moon-mouth at the night’s vault voice-goblet quenching-drink for the low-tide poppy-glow in the breakers of the heart. From “Unshadowed Light”

When my lip blends by the language

for Paul Celan The ice-wind tears the clockface shadowy bends the hands

razor-sharp in the dawn’s glow— the bird’s cry. From: “In the Stream of Time, Meditations in the Himalayas”

What is more

Everything is less, than it is. Everything is more . . . Paul Celan What the magpie of the night with its black beak wrote does daybreak not repeat the moonmouth closes is swallowed down airways cross and erase the tracks in the eye-lens colors and forms turn up

slow unveiling of the visible which is more than what it is. From “In the Stream of Time, Meditatioin in the Himalayas””

Morning star

“Oh Flower of Time” Paul Celan The morning star intoxicated by obscure sources, mirrors herself in the morning red then vanishes with the faded dreams of night ignited by the light the day wakes ephemeral flower of time. From “The Ephemeral Flower of Time”

Don’t count me among the almonds

Make me bitter, count me with the almonds —Paul Celan Don’t count me among them, don’t count me with what was bitter or too dark. Don’t count me among the bitter almonds. Give me, when the night is too dark, the light of the stars and the hope of dawn, the poppy of the dream. From “The Unrest of the Word,” unpublished Lake Como, Italy, 15.6.2016

Mandorla (The nothingness)

In the almond, what is in the almond? The nothingness . . . Paul Celan Soundless foghorn the moist mouth behind the bars

of darkness don’t call me don’t give me a name other than someone who passed by. From “Unshadowed Light”

Fugue of death* (Coronavirus)

To Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Jair Bolsonaro… Death, we drink you, we drink you with our eyes, we drink you with our ears we drink you day by day Dead, no time is left to say goodbye, no time to dig your graves, the leaders paved the road with hypocrisy and dazzling lies. Death, we drink you, we drink you with our eyes, we drink you with our ears we drink you day by day. Altea, Spain, 28.3.2020 *Todesfuge (Fugue of death), famous poem by Paul Celan about the extermination of Jews by the Nazis

Germain Droogenbroodt is yearly invited at the most prestigious international poetry festivals, received many awards and was nominated in 2017 for the Nobel Prize of Literature. He wrote 14 books of poetry published so far in 19 countries.

Winston Farrell

Revolutionary son

(For Martin Codogan) Liberated brother you shine like an elder Priest on high amongst your peers and prophets Ethiopia’s hands cradle you to earth Goodbye to green to red to black struggle. So many rivers we are afraid to cross Over our own Atlantic-ghost of history We need your guidance now more than ever Your flaming brimstone, your fiery foresight. Rudi, babies are rebelling in this hell Comrades yell their hands stretched up to heaven Fresh flowers wither brown, die in the drought This evening in your honour we break bread We break mould; we break heart and soul in song Farewell old soldier, rest triumphant troubadour.

The voice

This is the voice of the voice in the voice Bringing the word out the void into voice It’s the sound of the message in the word Voicing the past in the present future In a time and a place we now call dread This is the voice of the seed now it spring From a crack in the cliff of the country 0ut of the sands of the sure and the holy Up from the gutters of the city of commerce Straight to the gates of the up middle terrace This is the voice of the rage in the yout’s From the lips of the pain where the blood shoots It’s an echo in the head bottled up In the bowels of the ship deep within The soul of this modern society

This is the voice of the song where it pitch Note the blues in the shoes of a torn lyric It’s a mobile cellular scankking beat To a r n b hip-hop dance-hall high A new tune from the class-room to the streets.

This is the voice of the young up coming Stretching the rope at the back of the boundary Pulling and pushing at times umbilical Tugging on the pulse of yesterday’s dream A brighter tomorrow will begin today.

Winston Farrell is a poet, playwright and theatre practitioner in Barbados. A graduate of the University of Leeds with a Masters in Theatre and Development Studies. Follow @i.farrell

Joyce Ashuntantang

It was a question of time

Africa has been riddled with avoidable wars. From Biafra to Cabinda the embers are not dead From Liberia to Sierra Leone, the nightmare was real From South Sudan to Congo, peace is still a dream Cameroon was never THAT Africa The triangle cradled fragile peace As Anglophones pushed the argument of force Hoping for reason to block barrels of guns Today, Cameroon makes THE list Cries of “water na water” gauge bullets mid air Gruesome photos of dead bodies abound And refugees cross borders of spirits and earth. Displaced from our place of innocence Women are trapped in bushes stuffing moss for pads Children out of school use blood to write their names Graves are overrun with grass and abandoned bones They cannot say they did not see this coming They cannot say we were not a sleeping volcano They cannot say our blood is not on their heads 56 years and counting; it was a question of time.

A village in seven vignettes Vignette 1

She staggers, to the rhythm of gunshots Fragments of her younger self float in circles Younger feet scurry away in bushes; Bullets hit the walls around her; she’s 84

You have to do something. They are in my village! They will burn the village. That is all I have, a place to call home. Do everything you can!

Vignette 2:

He did not know the village had moved Home was now in the bush He had no time to find out A bullet found his heart in his chest

They just killed my cousin! You have to do something. No, he was not armed. Just returned from Mamfe. Got down from a bus and got a bullet. Make them leave. You have five stars!

Vignette 3

Her cry pieced the night like an owl The rain soaked the crowded etem No one could see what had bitten her Her breath labored until the break of day

Little lights appeared in our sky like spies. My people know it is them! Drones? Who sends drones to a village? Help me. You are my friend; Help me! My people!

Vignette 4

Who betrayed the land; calling the brutes in? Who told of our ancestral secrets and hideouts? Who gave our names to the slaughterhouse? Who gave our Dane gun count?

The fight was fierce! My people’s valor is now in song. They fought a tiger with bare hands and won. My people are laughing in the bush. Their laughter mocks the fear of impending doom.

Vignette 5

Someone is missing in the bush, they say. No one ever got missing in the village Her emptied bowels create a stench Someone has her heart, kidney and more

My people cannot live like this. Yes, she was found dead with missing body parts Do something! The ground is soaked in blood. The earth is shifting under us.

Vignette 6:

They are in our houses They are eating our fowls They are eating our goats Their boots trample our graves

Do you hear me? They are spitting on our dead. But you are the big boss. No Anglo is a boss? Are you still there?

Vignette 7:

Two lifeless bodies found Young men tending the wounded Red pieces of cloth falsely tag them Their blood is begging revenge

Do you hear me? My people are hunters. They wrestled with animals long ago. No, we cannot stop them. That is their land. Guns may kill, but guts fight!

Sonnet Mondal

The lost mango tree

The mango tree which I reared is lost today somewhere in the jungle of my wishes. I used to throw whole mangoes in our backyard to see them grow up into trees. Not a single leaf sprouted except from a half-eaten one. After watering it in its infancy I became engaged wining and dining with my life. After years — today a mangrove in our backyard shaded my memories from the hard sun of forgetfulness. I wish I had left myself to the charity of wilderness.

Beginnings

When I read a book of poems I try to think of the moment when the first flow of thoughts gushed through its pages. When I hear a music album I try to think of the moment when the first note of the first track in it kissed the muse of its roots.

When I walk barefoot, pressing ageless soils and gravels — I try to think of the moment when the earth was reared from ashes.

But, never do they recite the first anecdote of the planet. My head like a shapeless asteroid revolves around beginnings — to peer inside the static stance of time and the state of mind that sets it in motion.

Sonnet Mondal writes from Kolkata and is the author of Karmic Chanting (Copper Coin 2018) and five other books of poetry. He directs Kolkata's International Poetry Festival- Chair Poetry Evenings and serves as the Managing Editor of Verseville magazine.

Ashraf Aboul-Yazid

Modern egyptian poetry seeking an identity

In the middle of hard dilemmas, severe wars and bloody revolutions, people of literature try to find their solid roots that help them standing steady in the face of those strong quakes which could destroy everything. Amid all of modern changes forcing Egyptian poets, they seek for their identity; once by cultivating their old Sufi heritage for an inspiration, looking back in anger at the classic forms of poetry for a revenge, or going towards the west; the eternal conqueror, trying to invade it in return through languages, by finding a foot space for their words in different tongues. Some poets found that their poetic fathers are already dead or old, and the nostalgia for the past is more than having passion for the future: they think that any poet, in ancient history, who had spiritual anxiety, is a modern poet. “Constantine Cavafy (1863 – 1933), who was an Egyptian Greek poet, journalist and civil servant, is considered the poet of the present and the next moment, despite his many works is very old; he seems as if he is writing from grave. The conclusion is: If you want to kill poetry, it is very easy: limit it to one recipe or one pattern. Poetry is bigger than poets, and wider of all styles, it is a free bird that you cannot keep in cages.” (1). Looking at the different types and forms of Egyptian poetry today, I find it difficult to neglect the idea that getting quotes from the Sufi heritage would give us modern Sufi poets!

This is not true. Real Sufi poets made their hard roads as faithful seekers not naive imitators. A modern poet can have his or her own Sufism by getting himself/ herself a path of a faithful mission, but copying Sufi texts or inserting old Sufi verses in a modern poem will not make it a piece of Sufi literature. It was clear that “the emergence of a normative Sufi tradition during the fourth / tenth century can be traced most clearly in the appearance of a specialized literature that was self-consciously about Sufis and Sufism.” (2) But it is also obvious that such social inputs are rarely or impossible to be repeated. A modern poet is busy introducing himself openly to audience more than isolating himself from the noisy society. It is common to have modern poets who get inspired by mythology they read about or those who write daily simple poems expressing their hatred of busy crowded polluted cities without leaving them! Poets who run away to the good nature in the countryside, and poets who write direct speeches, are also common types of the modern poetry writing. You can believe them all, but I will not believe a poet fighting the crowd for a space to write a Sufi poem! The Identity I understand in the modern Egyptian poetry is the living resistance. An Egyptian poet, being an Egyptian citizen, must be trained to resist. He (she) resists the tough routine in governmental offices, the poverty that spread faster than a fire in a windy day, the oppression that faces anyone who is trying to criticize, and the difficulties a citizen suffers to live in good conditions suitable for a human being. This citizen is clearly described in Azmi Abdulwahab’s poem “Wax Museum”, from his collection “Walking in the Storm”, translated by Nasr Abdel Rahman, and dedicated to a man carrying the sea on his shoulders (3):

Wax Museum

Trees hate to stand still, Sparrows were killed by silence, Trains died waiting

At the stations, Phones do not transmit speech Between lovers.

Lovers jailed joy in their Eyes. Teenagers looked for a suitable park To share their love. Stiffenedon benches, They left gaps between their bodies For the wind to proveits Ascendancy. Cold devoured the limbs Of men While Women surrendered In an unequal battle With loneliness, Moreover; the innocence of children Grew old. Everything was muted Oh, God! Set this city free From the grip of a woman; Captured the sun in her hand, Before the whole universe Turns into a wax museum.

In a country where poets are repeatedly mistreated, it is difficult to talk away from the need for resisting poems, where this resisting poetry becomes an identity in itself. A modern poet sums up that way the country treated the Egyptian iconic poets: “We killed Salah Abdel Sabour (4), we arrested Fouad Haddad (5), we expelled Afifi Matar(6), and Hijazi(7)- who is one of our greatest poets- attacked us and we insulted him. As for Amal Dunqul(8), we ate his dead flesh and became more delicious than he was alive, cursing parties that repeat annually even though he is a great poet, and it is not appropriate for him to deny his poetry because it does not suit your taste, or because you want to adapt

it to your artistic standards, or because you want to tailor his poems to the size of globalization”.(1) It is very common that the images of hungry children insert themselves in love poems, as Mohammed El Hedeiny (9) writes in his poem - Transitions before and after death: I am a chemical substance, there is no question about that. I was solid when the hands threw me like a rubber ball until I was excluded from the bread queue, then I returned to my hungry children empty-handed. I was liquid when the shell hit me and knocked me down, and while the tears of heartbreak and soreness were flowing on my face, the thirsty ground insects were feeding on my hemorrhage. And I became gas when I died, then my body was buried and eventually I have nothing left only a name whose letters faded through the air. These days, reading Egyptian poems takes you away of certainty, it is a journey full of questions rather giving answers, a poet suspects everything and he feels suspicious about everyone. It is obvious for all generations, especially the elder one who lost faith in many of his early belief about many principals. Poet Gamal Al Qassas (10) recalls, in a poem entitled “I was born one morning under the convolvulus, translated by Kamal Mustafa Gad:

I was born one morning under the convolvulus “I was born one morning under the convolvulus I don’t know how my mother carried me to the far lands while I was turning round myself in her womb. She didn't give the usual scream . Only with a tendered smile , touched gently my shoulders ,

whispered in my ears : my son. This world is called life You will still a kid swimming in my soul At nine My mum went to the sky and didn't come back. Since that day, I have been racing my death I don't know what I need exactly How can I keep my heart in the wax discs I steal -from his pain - the dough of emptiness to feel that I was that boy who was born under the convolvulus . The pick of cock in his left thumb when they covered him with a flowery colorful scarf. Many times I lost my animal, its smell attracted the other ones, they were humans like me but they ignored the necessities of rhythm suspected of the love of laziness In the blue music

In the convolvulus.”

Thinking is less profound than intellect: This is how “the world arranges itself in the poem.” In the epic poem ““Icarus or Plotting the Dark: Diaries of the January Revolution” which was written by Alaa Abdel Hadi, (11):

Diaries of the January Revolution

“Once upon a time, writing was my safe haven. I bite my lips – to feel normal – and draw a smile.

There was a poet standing under the moon beams. He threw his fishing line beyond the window and before the tree, then rolled up his sleeves and waited.

There were scattered texts that no one collected and a mysteriously beautiful beat in the air.

There were dumb frogs under the surface that never stopped croaking, and poems crying like the newborn left unintentionally in

the dark so they might be seen and fill eyes like tears and dust. It's painful to smile to all of those, or to flow like water when water is the first to drown!

Should you have dreamt of death even if it were silly, even if you met some of them there?

Should you have escaped to the suburb, to a blank sheet, so you do not live lonely?” Along the vast verses of his book we agree with Alaa Alaa Abdel Hadi: Any exact interpretation of poetry is a grave mistake. Some poetry is as ripe as the fruit that cannot be eaten twice! Poetry is a muse that no one owns. Poetry is a gift; it cannot be tutored! Writing is the exhale of poetry; silence its inhale! We meet our forsaken thoughts in poetry. In poetry, secrecy is a new innovation. The poem is the poet's house and grave. Blessed is the ignorant poet! The viable poetic text puts on masks. Rhyme and rhythm are exceptions in poetry. Life is the only value the poet looks for in his poem. Artifice and innocence are juxtaposed in the poetic text. Poets create their predecessors and persist. The least skill in poetry is worth a lot. The poet returns to his poem like an old friend. As if poetry is the game of the extravagant! Does it cancel its reassuring rhetoric and spread its garment to show us its material, so we leave its outdated craftsmanship and tell the tales using only the taste of letters Poetry never stops screaming in everything, but we do not listen carefully. With labor, the poem seems distant despite its closeness. Poetry is a false understanding, a false interpretation, & a false vow. Poetry is faithful to none but itself. I am poetry: the wretched, faces and words. Poetry is not a house for creed. The poet arranges sense rather than bursting meaning. Poetry is not a master everywhere. The examples I brought referring to these mentioned above poets, who are aged from 30s to 70 years, could have a common vision that considers the misery of poet in our modern times. We cannot separate between the poet and society where suffering is also uniting between them.

Notes:

(1) Poet Emad Abo Saleh, the Egyptian poet, in an interview for Akhbar Al

Adab weekly, by Hassan Abdel Maogoud, republished in the AsiaN,

November 7, 2020 (2) Sufism, the Formative Period, Ahmet T. Karamustafa, AUC, Cairo, 2007, p. 83

(3) Azmi Abdulwahab, Egyptian poet with a bachelor of Arts in Arabic

Language Department, Mansoura University. He is member of the Egyptian

Syndicate of Journalists. He works as head of the cultural section of the "Al-Ahram Al-Arabi" weekly magazine. He published eight collections of poetry in Cairo and Beirut. (4) Salah Abdel Sabour, (May 1931 – 14 August 1981) was an Egyptian free verse poet, editor, playwright and essayist (5) Fouad Haddad (1927–1985) was an Egyptian poet, who wrote in the

Egyptian vernacular. (6) Muhammad Afifi Matar (1935 – 28 June 2010), was a leading Egyptian poet. (7) Ahmed Abdel Muti Hijazi (born in 1935) is an Egyptian contemporary poet. (8) Amal Abul-Qassem Donqol (1940 – 1983) was an Egyptian poet whose poems were influenced by Greek mythology, then pre-Islamic and Islamic imagery to modernize Arabic poetry. (9) Mohammed El Hedeiny’s Nobody There, very short stories, Egypt, 2017, won the State Incentive Award for Literature.

(10) Gamal Al Qassas (b. 1950) is a co-founder of Idaa Group (Illumination), one of the leading voices in modern poetry movement since 1970s. (11) Alaa Abdel Hadi (1956), Egyptian poet, critic, Ph. D. in Literary Criticism/

Comparative Literature, Secretary General of Arab Writers’ Union.

Chairman of the Egyptian Writers’ Union Icarus or Plotting the Dark:

Diaries of the January Revolution, Cairo, published by the Egyptian Book

Authority: 2016.

Ashraf Aboul-Yazid, Egypt. President, Asia Journalist Association. Some of his 35 books were translated into 7 languages, winner of Manhae Prize in Literature, Korea, 2014.

Jahidul Huq

Handkerchief

The one in my hand is a piece of cloth, merely a scrap of woven fabric. Only in your hand have I seen, for the first time, a fistful of fabric turn into a handkerchief. How delicate and fine – with an admixture of fragrance of your breath, ‘Les fleurs du mal’ become a bouquet held by your fingers, sometimes gliding along glistening sweat, sucking up your kisses. I filled my eyes with the display of all those red dots in blue -- the blue of your eyes dotted by the red glow of your wet lips. They remain memorable in the midst of my grief, my sorrows being their subject-serf. Do you recall how I used to entreat, “Why don’t you buy me a handkerchief like that?” And you responded merrily with flirtatious eyes, saying, “Don’t you know that giving handkerchiefs causes heartbreaks, brings on the rifts and distractions in the sojourns of ecstasy! Woven or embroidered patterns, you know, create encumbrance.” I know. Even now, whenever I buy handkerchiefs, I remember. You seem to have forgotten. But I keep weaving words on my loom, knitting you with exquisite designs drawn in my dreams, those intricate ones you refused to give me are now blowing in the wind against endless clouds. Translated by Farida Majid

This train is named Garcia Lorca

1.

This train is named Garcia Lorca. It runs back and forth Barcelona-Granada (half of it then goes to Malaga). The air becomes heavy with the songs of sailors. Andalusia's heart spills over in its fountains. The day wipes off its sweat on a summer day, dreams create waves in the olive groves. What sorrow lurks behind even as the twilight dances in wide swipes of its red skirt? What sad lament did the wind heave in the orange garden on that night of the assassins? O twilight! You are the dear maiden of which gypsy tribe? The crimson red fever of dance swings through your veins. Your lips are spring-like, spilling forth the trilling songs! What a joy is in this country, and how sweet are its maidens! The intricate motifs of Alhambra are like talking memories, and they bring to mind the diamond of your eyes. Dust of the olden day blows at the galloping horses' hoofs. Who says this country is frozen, dead? Warm life bubbles over and above all the deceased. Grains, poetry, wine, sunlight and sweat are playful — the full moon glows, oblivious of its dark phase. Yet, this soil was bloodied. And the soil tore its heart to speak out! Signals of woods, wide plains, hills and river banks recede fast from the view. Clouds float aimlessly like torn stanzas of a Qasida. Hours, weeks and years melt in the heat of the day's sunlight. Someone is also fleeing, leaving behind his heart in a dark cupboard!

There are also the ones that are hiding between the olive trees, and in the folds of the hills. They seek cover for their own shadows while burying others' lives in eternal chill.

2.

A fragrance from afar tears through the breeze — the mind wonders on a calm day ripened by the sun. It is the season of Autumn, crowded, all savings dwindle needlessly in the end. Pain and doubt stoke the flames of memory increasing the severity of drought. Memories play the organ in my heart. sound of tears face the oncoming sunset. Ah! Spring is around the corner, promising a life with some madness! O girl! Sing us a sad lore! Someone strums up a cactus-tune on the guitar, and Cordova recedes farther away from far. Will the menacing shadows of the assassins stalk the heart? Where is the grave, that last bed in the eternal dark? Or is it still afloat in the air, awake and alone, in gloomy Madrid, in Granada, or somewhere in Spain? Or will it tap the breast and fish out the heart, still drunk and moonstruck?

This train is named Garcia Lorca. It runs up and down Barcelona-Granada. This train is a very strange one! Each of its bogeyes is filled with sorrow. Nerves weep humming a delicate ghazal tune, the day's lameness listens to it intently.

O train, you run farther and farther away, as if far is somehow better, far better than what is near or current. What novelty is being cooked up in tomorrow's pot In a stew of terribly unfamiliar dreams? Yet your journey without stops brings on a dash of sadness on a full moon night the stars get soaked by which all night long. And it gives recitals of laments and elegies Pinning their lines across the arch of the sky as decorations, as dreams well-crafted. All it cares about is how to leave things behind. It cleaves the heart with love, the love that outpours from Andalusian founts, the love that gives the comely gypsy girl her curves.

3.

Lorca, these lines of my poems, like guerillas, will hunt for your assassins. They will carry over the long decades the sound of tears, the incurable pain in the veins, and will raise gusts of turbulent wind in the hills, and in the olive gardens. This trains is named Garcia Lorca. It runs up and down Barcelona-Granada.

Translated by Farida Majid

Jahidul Huq is one of the major poets of modern bangla language. He also writes short stories, novel and lyrical poetry for song. Jahidul huq worked as Deputy Director General at Bangladesh Betar (Radio), Sinior Editor and Broadcaster at Radio Deutche Welle in Colone, Jahidul huq awarded Bangla Academy.

Claudia Piccinno

The courage of the losers

He has big eyes… Ismael a parched mouth Ikrahm, a ringing voice Aziz. They are far from the train of the wind the English Kindertransport when the war afflicted Europe. They are the kids on the way The innocent eyes of today, the lambs sacrificed to the cross by land and by sea Those we see parading at the tv news We the servants of Charon, We ”the civilians” we hostage of indifference, victims and possibly accomplices of a similar addiction.. We are on the edge of the path crowded with outstretched hands, we... we are motionless with our hidden little arms That do not essay to offer any help. He has big eyes… Ismael A parched mouth Ikrahm, A ringing voice Aziz. Din of bombs in their memories, at the foot sores chilblains and hands. The baton of the guards spares no one, It is worse than the swing of the tides, It seems the hunger of sharks. Poverty, famine, epidemics. Ismael, Ikrahm, Aziz; To go, to stay, to come back The civilized Europe has invented a deadly device:

the refugee camp to make us accustom to the diaspora of the Lambs to the obtuseness of our minds to the unmathed courage of the losers

Pain and strength

I’m living your pain, oh mother! I feel the suffering veins of your arms. I sniffed the death rattle of a tired heart. I look at your intermittent sleep Like the falling drop slowly To sew the still tear of a tormented body. I breathed your strength without ever knowing Since my trip into your amniotic fluid. This is the legacy of your race... mother. Pain and strength. And rebirth. Because together with you I will reborn Once again, today as yesterday, Tomorrow and forever. There are inheritances that multiply themselves As they were pins on The equilibrium axis. Pain and strength. And rebirth.

Claudia Piccinno is an Italian poet. She has published 34 poetry books, among her own poetry collections and other poets' translations into Italian language. She was conferred with the most prestigious award “Stele of Rosetta” in Istanbul in 2016. She is European editor for the international literary magazine Papirus in Turkey and for Atunis Magazine international. Her website is https://claudiapiccinno.weebly.com

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis

Birds in pandemic

A bird up in the tree is in distress. I cannot see her. I just hear her callings. Only the trees know the sorrows of the birds. ~~~ The young bird in the tree has been calling since morning. Perhaps she is hungry, and her parents have gone out to get some grub. I often see them at the shopping center by the food court and water fountain. In the lockdown, there is nothing there for them to eat. I invite the birds in the pandemic home for breakfast and lunch. I interview them. They have many stories to tell. I also write letters to the editors and ask Who wants to publish the stories of the birds? I receive a response It's absurd! ~~~ The bird's nest is on the ground. Her agony encompasses the sphere. She flutters around her broken home and collects the feathers scattered in her beak.

She takes them to a safer place and comes back quickly to gather some more. She has been doing this all day today, without rest. Before nightfall, she must mend her nest.

Her fledglings have gone missing. One is dead. We just buried it under a tree. One in my hand is breathing inconsistently. The mother does not know.

I can't let her baby be prey. I build the fledge a home, with leaves and grass. Until the mother returns, it is going to be here. We have to do this together.

What becomes of a ravished woman?

A ravished woman turns into incense. The ashes of her body folded in her fluids, the splinters of her bones stick to roll on. Her spirit ignites. In her flame, she burns like Eucalyptus and Sandalwood, Rose and Jasmine, Champa, Frankincense, Tulsi, and Sage.

Her perfume lingers heavily in the air.

Kalpna Singh-Chitnis is an Indian American poet, writer, and Editor-in-Chief of Life and Legends. She has authored four poetry collections, and her works have appeared in notable journals worldwide. Website: www.kalpnasinghchitnis.com

Ayaz Rasool Nazki

Three poems

1 One by one wound by wound, please remove all tapes, Band-Aids securely fastened bandages. let each gash open up each laceration weep; crimson red blood, drain the sinews and end the drought in the wilderness of my being let roses bloom let daffodils sprout. 2 Why no dogs bark in this dumb and deaf night? who is hiding in the dark across the street? what is hovering over the tree tops, and who is knocking at my door? 3. Night torments a bunch of blisters on my soles! Across the last desert before advent of dawn, I promised a lonely tree a nest; before I am gone.

Ayaz Rasool Nazki is an important poet and Novelist from Kashmir, India. He writes in Kashmiri, Urdu and English. Professor Nazki belongs to a family of scholars and poets in Kashmir.

Bhisma Upreti

Flower

A flower teaches one To give out a smile To be humble And to truly live one's life But then people don't understand That a flower is also telling us other things 'Youth and smile are merely guests At the end, life too will dry out And will come to an end shortly It is so much better That one gives out sweet fragrance to everyone while one lives.' Translated by Sarthak Karki

Immense happiness

You awoke even today morn that for you is for now your biggest happiness. Being sorrowful and full of tearful woes no reason have you to be so. For Nature readily bestows smiles and colourful hues.

Rise into gratefulness oh man. Sing tunes of humbleness. Songs of hope and faith.

Your heart’s strumming a melody in tandem with your dynamic breath and raring to go eagerly are your feet. Translated by Meenu Minocha

Bhisma Upreti is an award winning Nepali poet and writer. Total 21 books (poems, essays, travelogue and Novel) are in his credits. Currently, he is Secretary of PEN Nepal (Nepalese chapter of PEN International).

Hasna Jasimuddin Moudud Mystic poetry of Bangladesh

Bangladesh is characterized by a unique coming together of many races, languages and religions. Its culture is a distinctive composite to which Jains, Buddhists, Hindus, Vaisnavas and Muslims have all contributed. From time to time Bangladesh searches for its roots as if trying to put back the missing parts in its long history. In the search for these roots we must look at its poetry. Defining poetry and tradition , C.M. Bowra states that poetry is the most important element of history. He maintains that poetry ensures the continuity of civilization by preserving the treasures of the past for future generations; in so doing it also predicts and shapes the future. The poetry of a nation reveals to us what that nation has seen and felt. In the absence of recorded history poetry can serve as a dependable documentation of the past. It unfolds a civilization. At the same time it enables us to know ourselves and to look at our own traditions from fresh perspective. Poetry serves as an important cultural vehicle. The translation of poetry allows us to look deeply into a foreign civilization and communicate with others. Though translation can never be an adequate substitute for the original, it is nevertheless a valuable instrument for spreading new outlooks and ideas, in showing us what kind of culture others experience, and for suggesting areas of exchange and the cooperation of ideas and techniques.

In 1907 an Indian scholar, Haraprashad Sastri, working in the Royal Archive in Nepal discovered a palm-leaf manuscript of 'Caryagiti', mystic poems by Bengali Buddhist poets. The poems, also collectively known as the 'Caryapada', were published by him in 1916. Sastri's discovery brought to light the oldest specimens not only of Bengali poetry but also of Indo-Aryan literature. According to Dr. Mohammad Shahidullah the discovery of the Caryagiti means that Bengali literature can be dated as far back as the seventh century. It is probable that the language had developed a hundred years before this. These poem-songs in old Bengali, designed to be sung with a particular raga, constitute an integral part of the heritage of Bangladesh and the basis of a long established tradition of poetry which has survived to the present day. These verses by Buddhist mystic poets are not only beautifully written and add greatly to Bengali literary traditions but they also constitute an invaluable source for the study of Bengali society and the Buddhist religion between the seventh and twelfth centuries. They are a particularly important discovery, since there are very few historical documents of the period in existence. Although the Siddhacaryas, the writers of the Caryagiti dealt primarily with certain deeper metaphysical problems of tantric Buddhism, they also described their world. They give us a vivid account of the life and occupations of the common people, their work, events of birth, marriage and death, religious activities, dress and ornaments, food and utensils, and music and musical instruments. There is also a beautiful description of the riverine and green eastern part of Bengal which is Bangladesh today. The poems describe rivers, canals, ponds, muddy shores, various types of boats and their different parts, ferrying, and rowing: all these were used by the Siddhacaryas as spiritual symbols. The Bengali Siddhas, Buddhist mystics, used poetry as a vehicle for teaching one of the most difficult and mystic religions, that known as the Shahajia mystic school of Buddhism. Through the use of the mother tongue of the common people, the mystic poets conveyed serious religious philosophies. The poems are a part of

the cultural and religious heritage of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Tibet. Although these songs are still ritually sung in Nepal and Bhutan very little research has been carried out on the subject. They deserve to be known outside the region. According to Dr. Muhammad Shahidullah, the Caryagiti as a literary genre are the origins of both the later Vaisnavaite Sanskrit and vernacular songs and the Persian ghazals. The main characteristics of Buddhist songs, according to Dr. Shahidullah, are: a) They are short rhymed poems intended for singing, b) The name of the composer appears in the last verse, c) They are near erotic in theme? The Caryagiti influenced Gita-govinda, a famous Sanskrit work of the Bengali poet Jayader and Vaisnava Padabali, and, much later, Rabindranath Tagore and the Baul songs of Bangladesh. Gita-govinda is a celebration of love between Krishna, the god of love, and Radha. Divine love is humanized and the poems present erotic mysticism. Gita-govinda is written in a Kavya form, divided into formal cantos, and includes lyric drama, pastoral, an opera, a melodrama and a refined Yatra or play. The poems do not follow the Sanskrit tradition but bear a close resemblance to the spirit and style of the Caryagiti and old Bengali poetry. The musical padabalis, although composed in Sanskrit, actually follow the Bengali manner of expression and use rhymed and melodious moraic meters, uncommon in Sanskrit poems. Tagore was greatly influenced by the Baul songs during his stay in East Bengal, as he frequently mentions in his writings. In Bangladesh the Shahajia Baul songs continue the tradition today. My main objective here is to provide an anthology in English of the poems from Sastri’s text. There have been three attempts to translate the Caryagiti into English but in no case did any of the scholars have access to the original manuscript, depending instead on Tibetan and Mongolian translations and on the Sanskrit notes provided in the manuscript by the Sanskrit commentator, Munidatta.

The need to publish an up-to-date translation is particularly urgent, since the original palm-leaf manuscript in Nepal appears to be missing and is therefore no longer available to scholars of the Caryagiti. My translation is, for the first time, entirely based on the primary source and on a microfilm copy of the original manuscript in my possession. In addition to the Sastri collection, I am including three poems which are missing in the Nepal collection and which have since been retrieved from Tibetan sources. I have also included three Caryas composed by Atisa Srigana Dipankara, More importantly, this anthology includes a second Caryagiti manuscript which I discovered during an extensive search in Nepal in 1984 and 1988; the paper manuscript containing these Caryagiti has not bees published anywhere. It is possible that the source of this manuscript is of the same age, or older than, the manuscript found by Sastri. My publication of this finding will. I hope encourage other scholars to search for old manuscripts which still lie buried in archives and temples and which are in danger of being destroyed. For the first time in an English edition, this anthology includes the iconography and life sketches of the Siddhas from the school of the famous eighty-four Siddhas. In translating these poems I have been struck by their simplicity and grace and I have attempted to use simple English in order to make them more readable. Whilst I have kept as close as possible to the original, I have also tried to retain a local flavor. Both in my translations and commentaries I have avoided burdening the reader with notes, strictly adhering to the view that the poems should speak for themselves. I have deliberately treated them with a light hand so as not to overburden them with my own interpretations of their meanings and inner-meanings. After all, who can be sure what the poets really meant? Besides, if everything were to be explained, it would dilute the mystic qualities of the poems.

The text

The discovery of the palm-leaf manuscript of Caryagiti by Bengali

Buddhist poets has pushed back the history of Bengali literature to over a thousand years. The poems, collectively known as the Caryapadas were discovered in 1907 by the Indian scholar Haraprashad Sastri in the Royal Archive of Nepal and were published in 1916. This discovery brought to light the oldest specimen not only of Bengali poetry but also of Indo-Aryan literature. The manuscript published by Sastri and entitled Hajar Bacharer Purana Bangala Bhasay Bauddha Gaan o Doha (‘Buddhist songs and couplets in one thousand year old Bengali language’) contains forty-six songs and a fragment of one further song. It consists of sixty-nine folios with writing on both sides. The missing songs are nos. 24, 25 and 48 and the last line of song 23. These songs are preserved in Tibetan translations. The original manuscript may have been longer, since the commentary by Munidatta to song 50 is incomplete. The colophon in the Tibetan translation is missing. The manuscript is a commentary which quotes the songs it comments on. The text of Caryagiti and Munidatta is included in the Tibetan Bstan-'gyur or Tanjur. Besides the Sastri's discovery, Tibetan translations and Mongolian translations of the Caryagiti exist, which actually helped in the putting together of a complete anthology. It seems that Dr. Nilratan Sen alone had access to the only available Sastri manuscript of the Caryagiti, which he published in a facsimile reproduction of the manuscript in a Bengali edition. No other author seems to have actually worked with the primary source except Sastri who hand-copied the manuscripts as he discovered them. Per Kvaerne, the Norwegian scholar who translated Caryagiti wrote: The original MS utilized by Sastri has not been available for inspection. It fact, I have not been able to discover where, if at all, it is preserved.1 In view of this comment I have brought together two manuscripts for inspection by readers and new scholars. The Mongolian translation of the Tibetan text of Caryagiti is found in the Mongolian Tanjur vol. 49, folios 292b-345a, under the title Yabudal-un dayulal-un Sang-un tailburi. A copy of this rare Mongolian Tanjur is preserved in the State Public Library of the Mongolian People's Republic in Ulan Bator.

After an exhaustive search I have rediscovered only a few pages of the Sastri manuscripts, so long thought to be well preserved in the Nepalese Archive. The complete manuscripts exist on microfilm but the original manuscript is missing, except for a few pages which I am presenting in this text. In 1984, I discovered a second manuscript of the Caryagiti, on paper, in the Asha Archive. a private collection in Nepal. I am presenting this second manuscript of the Caryagiti, which has not yet been published anywhere. At a first reading the manuscripts seem to be quite similar, including the numbers of the missing poems in the palm-leaf manuscripts, which are now available on microfilm. The script in the second manuscript seems well defined. Although they seem to be similar, they must obviously stand as separate sources of the Caryagiti. I am also including three Caryatikas composed by Atisa Srigana Dipankara which I copied from Tanjur in Bhutan and from Dr. Aloka Chattopadhaya's English translations. Dr. M. Aries of Oxford University has provided me with the translation and comments which I am including in the present text. Rahul Samkrtyayan discovered an old palm-leaf manuscript of East Indian origin in the Sa-Skya monastery in Tibet. It includes fifteen songs by Vinasri, one by Sumai, one by Lui and one by Kanhapa. Others have discovered Carya songs composed at a much later date. I am including a few pages from Caryas composed after our present text, which I found in Nepal. (Illustration 5). The Caryas were songs and were used as accompaniments for dance, as was common in tantric rites. Solo and chorus were accompanied by musical instruments such as cymbals, ankle bells, Mridonga and drums. These songs are still being sung in Nepal and Bhutan and are sometimes danced to by the Vajracaryas in Nepal. The dance is expressed in slow motion with complex but rhythmic movements of the entire body, and is usually performed by old tantric Vajracaryas. I had the pleasure of witnessing Vajracarya dancing and singing at the Lalitkala Academy in Nepal. Sastri referred to the song-poems as Caryacaryaviniscaya, which

means determining what is and what is not practiced. This title, used by Sastri, is not found in the text itself. Perhaps Sastri used the title from the accompanying Sanskrit notes by Munidatta who uses the term in the introductory verse, 'ascarya-carya-caya.' It is the Tibetan translation which gives the title of the work, Carya-giti-kosha-vrtti Popularly the poems are known in Bengal as Carya-giri or Carya songs. The Caryagiti are accompanied by a detailed commentary in Sanskrit by one Munidatta. Munidatta was well-versed in the writings of the Siddhas – he commented on as well as reproduced the poems in a Sanskritised form. According to Per Kvaerne who has used Munidatta and Tibetan sources extensively in his translation: ‘While it is true that Caryagiti cannot be adequately understood without the help of Tibetan and Munidatta's commentary, it is equally true that the Tibetan translation is more or less unintelligible without constant reference to the basic text.’ It is for this reason that I felt that an English translation based on the Bengali text itself will be most relevant.

1Anthology of Mexican Poetry, compiled by Octavio Paz , Paz (Bloomington : Indiana University Press 1971) p. 20. 2Dr. Muhammad Shahidullah, Buddhist Mystic Songs, (Dacea: Renaissance Printers, 1974), p. xxix 1Per Kvaeme, An Anthology of Buddhist Tantric Songs (Bangkok: White Orchid Press, 1986), p.1.

Hasna Jasimuddin Moudud, Former Professor University of Development Alternative, Former Lecturer, University of Dhaka. She has taught English at the Dhaka University and has been a Visiting Scholar at University of Oxford, at George Washington University and Harvard University.

Julio Pavanetti

Complicity

In the corner of mellowed kisses our great solar fury was silenced, disintegrated, oh Sylph of the sea, into deep and frenzied atoms. Crushed against the grey window they dispersed encompassing us through our trembling entangled bodies. In the complicity without cushion, from our corner of gasps, satisfied after a synchronized movement, a captured scene remained, while our chests were still beating in a vertical sea of lethargic sex.

Our beach of the past

At the peak of dusk amid fading scenery, just as the sun searches the humid pearls that fall, blinding the mirror of the wind with its used repertoire of silver strands, we turned our backs to the rainbow breaking the clouds hidden in our packs. Meanwhile, in front of us the infinite sea with its crackling vast blue, moderates its symphony, unfastens its own cotton

against the multiform rocks and sinks into the dispersed sand that kisses this naked beach, where we came in the past to illuminate our dreams

Dawn

Under the silenced care of a vigilant moon -after the rise of desirethe victorious revolution of our bodies was confirmed. Perspiring and exhausted by carnal spasms, defeated and triumphant at a time, we fell in the arms of Morpheus. After the expressions of love, numbed by the moment among red poppies, the dawn stormed in flapping prudently through space and time.

Julio Pavanetti is a Uruguayan poet and a cultural promoter. He lives now in Villajoyosa, Spain. He is founder and President of the international poet’s association “Liceo Poético de Benidorm”. Director of the poetry collection "Azul" of Enkuadres Publishers, Alzira, Spain. *Director of the International Poetry Festival “Benidorm & Costa Blanca” (FIPBECO). He has published eleven books of poetry.

Carolyne Wright

KZ

"Arbeit Macht Frei" —Motto over the entrance of every Nazi concentration camp We walk in under the empty tower, snow falling on barbed-wire nets where the bodies of suicides hung for days. We follow signs to the treeless square, where the scythe blade, hunger, had its orders, and some lasted hours in the cold when all-night roll calls were as long as winter. We've come here deliberately in winter, field stubble black against the glare of snow. Our faces go colorless in wind, cold the final sentence of their bodies whose only identity by then was hunger. The old gate with its hated grillework sign walled off, we take snapshots to sign and send home, to show we've done right by winter. We've eaten nothing, to stand inside their hunger. We count, recount crimes committed in snow— those who sheltered their dying fellows' bodies from the work details, the transport trains, the cold. Before the afternoon is gone, the cold goes deep, troops into surrendered land. Signs direct us to one final site, where bodies slid into brick-kiln furnaces all winter or piled on iron stretchers in the snow like a plague year's random harvest. What hunger can we claim? Those who had no rest from hunger stepped into the ovens, knowing already the cold at the heart of the flame. They made no peace with snow. For them no quiet midnight sign from on high—what pilgrims seek at the bottom of winter— only the ebbing measure of their lives. Their bodies

are shadows now, ashing the footprints of everybody who walks here, ciphers carrying the place of hunger for us, who journey so easily in winter. Who is made free by the merciless work of cold? What we repeat when we can't read the signs-the story of our own tracks breaking off in snow. Snow has covered the final account of their bodies but we must learn the signs: they hungered, they were cold, and in Dachau it was always winter.

The miracle room

(Nosso Senhor do Bomfim Church: São Salvador da Bahia) The Kodaks focus on the ceiling, a Baroque reliquary, doll factory of arms and legs. Facsimiles the grateful make of ghost limbs raised from the dead, silver medals from the mouths of infants who weren't supposed to live. Before-and-after photos, testimonies scotch-taped for years to the wall. The home-movie makers check their light meters and wonder what's held up the tour bus. They don't notice the little girl who comes in through the side door without a face. They don't see her cross herself, dip her fingers in holy water with coupons from the Bahia Hilton floating on its surface. No one notices her slide along the wall, finding her way with the help of plaster hands that catch hold of hers. The charter group doesn't know she's lighting a candle, kneeling before Our Lord of Facelessness,

Our Lord of Bomfim. They can't see the black madonnas in their sea-froth lace nod from the altars, raise carved hands in blessing. Not even the Cooks Tour guides reciting from the souvenir brochures glance over to see her rise, blink, sneeze once, press fingers to the deep rose of her mouth, and skip out the chapel door, swinging a mask from which the features have been erased.

Eulene meets crow/Eulene eats crow

I Out of the estuarine crocodile's snuggled jaws, out of the mud-colored snort of the wild boar, browsing hock-deep in primordial slime, out of the deadly chiaroscuro of sunlight in thickets where the Bengal tiger blinks and whole subspecies of foliage rearrange themselves like silks around the throne of a potentate, out of the miasma, the stunted saline verdure of the Sunderbans, stunned and sun-weary, flapped

Crow that brackish-billed anathema, on a weekend tour of the desperate delta's last paradisiacal standoff, in a private launch doing loops through channels where hand-adzed atavistic scows groaned to their gunnels with teak, mahogany, and pearls— all the unprotected renderings of a preserve the government has set aside for spoilage.

Where boatmen poled their slow-motion plunder upstream to the nearest port, and sang ballads in mournful modes about honey-gatherers scraped up limbby-limb between the hives after some stiff-jointed, superannuated man-eater limped out of cover and sampled them for the sweetness of their flesh.

Neither off-course nor off his feed, Crow relished these legends of gore and groanings wrested from the throat. New additions to his repertoire. He squawked and hopped up and down on the top of his Port-a-Parrot carrier, straining at his thin tin shackle till it snapped . . . . . . while his master, crouching at the prow and peering through binoculars, chatted with the aides-de-camp and took notes on shadows flitting behind the green purdah-curtain of the forest. Ignored, Crow spied his chances, soared remorselessly off. II Meanwhile, upriver in her ancestral watering-hole, Kukurpukur, her Dogpatch-on-the-Delta—

Eulene.

Begum Eulene, with teased and hennaed beehive and Mandarin-lacquered claws, swathed in some filmy, glitter-sprinkled thing that revealed more than it concealed but veiled her up to the eyelids. Begum Eulene, practiced in all the arts of entrapment, with eunuchs to do her dirty work.

She was plotting her escape to the capital, away from this down-country duchess's idler's life: nothing to do but supervise the cook's boy whacking at cabbages with a king-sized scimitar, squabble with the sultan's wives and listen through the lattice-work grille of the women's wing to the hum of the rice crop growing. Might as well be Dubuque as Daulatpur. She put on her see-through burkha. With her favorite eunuch, Iqbal "Sneaky" Siddiqi, she crept out through the cistern window, dropped like a black leaf to the road below and hailed the nearest rickshaw into town.

Now she lounged under the rotting canvas canopy of Hussein's Tea Stall and Kebab-O-Rama, swatting at flies and smoldering in the sultry air like some Thirties' cinema spitfire, looking to the local oglers like a houri from Hell.

III Suddenly, out of the sun blasting its jackhammer through every shanty off the square, exploded Crow. What had he noticed below? Tinfoil fringes shimmering on the handlebars of rickshaws, bottle shards glinting in trash outside the tea stalls?

Crow's belly rumbled, thunder in a blackening sky. Words like "Truth" and "Beauty" corkscrewed through his brain, his appetite dangerously close to melt-down.

He closed his wings and dropped to a heap of used banana plates glorified with a nimbus of fruit flies . . . as Eulene whipped her seed-pearl veil back over her face and stepped out into mid-day's purgatorial blaze. She met Crow at the nadir of his divebomb: a black hole colliding with a neutron star.

They picked themselves up and stared each other down--the recognition instant: two zeros canceling each other out. Crow unruffled his feathers and preened his pinions, a perfect study in nonchalance. Eulene, too, could do indifference but for this show she hunched her hackles and raised her burkha's anthracite-mesh wings— the pose crows know as Raven-Feigns-Rage. Could they gabble to each other, and from their colloquy across the species cobble together a world? Not in this stunned din, as the negative force fields fused and all Kukurpukur imploded. . . They'd tried their best to satisfy the catastrophists, as the earth collapsed into random gas and protoplasmic goo. Eulene and Crow flapped off into the phlogiston past the last tatter of the ozone layer. The planet gone poof beneath them.

For Ted Hughes and the original Crow

Published in Mania Klepto: the Book of Eulene (Turning Point Books, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Carolyne Wright

A Note on "Eulene Meets Crow/Eulene Eats Crow" Ted Hughes was Guest of Honor at the Second—and last—Asia Poetry Festival held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in November 1989, a fête hosted by Bangladesh's then-President H. M. Ershad. One of Mr. Hughes's chief interests in accepting Ershad's invitation to Bangladesh was to visit the Sunderban, the forest covering the delta region of the Ganges River. It is one of the last remaining wild preserves of the Royal Bengal Tiger, which Mr. Hughes hoped to see in its natural habitat. Meanwhile, Eulene had recently arrived in the guise of personal factotum and gadfly-in-waiting to an American poet and translator (a.k.a. moi). Unable to languish indefinitely in the luggage storage area of this poet's Dhaka lodgings, Eulene burst out and found herself in surreptitious attendance at the poetry festival, seeking Crow (who had also not been invited.) There, unaware of Eulene's (and Crow's) shadow-presences, the American poet met Hughes and learned of his plan to see the Sunderban during his stay in Bangladesh. After Mr. Hughes's return to England, the poem began to struggle forth from the creative primal ooze, after Eulene stowed aboard the launch bearing the American poet on her own visit to the Sunderban. Mr. Hughes was in fact amused when Eulene informed him that she had plotted such a meeting with his poetic character since she had first read The Life and Songs of the Crow back in graduate school. She had bided her time, merely waiting for her occasion.

An early version of this poem, which Eulene sent to Crow in England a few months later, is among Ted Hughes's papers in the Special Collections Department of Emory University's Robert F. Woodruff Library. The American poet, who happened to be teaching at Emory University that term, was moved to see this and other correspondence when she was permitted to view these papers a few weeks after Ted Hughes's death in late October 1998.

Keshab Sigdel

With the waves of rara*

Deceiving the pine trees standing in sentry The moon flirts with the lake In response The lake creates ripples of waves And splashes as if it were a rehearsal of an enticing dance Of a winter night! The moon, as always, Continues its own course In that caliginous night The lake sees the moon’s revived youthfulness Its seductive appearance Excites the lake And it liberates in the waves.

In the light of the moon The lake appears intriguing My sickening heart Becomes even more impatient And, to pacify the unquenched desires My imagination dives into the lake. As the night exceeds The breathe of hostlers Evaporate and dissolve in the sky And the horses moving from the alleys nearby Wake up the lazy sleeps With their neck-bells.

Travelers with their bag-packs Spend a night in the tents at the bank of Rara And anxiously wait for the sun to come out In the morning, They pick up their cameras

And click a photograph Of the sun's reflection On the lake.

I keep waiting For the moon to come back again; When the birds and horses sleep Wearing the night’s somber I prepare myself to consume The excitement of the lake Rippling towards the edges In the obscene light of the moon!

* Rara is the biggest and deepest fresh water lake in the Himalayas of Nepal.

Chengdu1

I rode on the turtle’s back Back to four centuries Along the Mingjiang River And the basin greeted me with Swaying crops and fruits I drank in the nectar of the greens I jumped and laughed And woke up at the station Where the city metro alarmed To resume to the South I watched the Pandas Dancing in their divine gestures Amidst the bamboo groves Dujiangyan2 Worked in and out To ensure the basin’s fertility We climbed the flyovers in the downtown That took us to a country of bliss Tian Fu3 is thy name O Chengdu!

I assume abundance runs through The sounds of the sparrows And the footprints of the turtles I just smile To see thousands of faces blurred In the speed of the super express highway.

___________________________________________________ 1 A city in Sichuan Province of China 2 Irrigation system in the Chengdu basin 3 Tian Fu in Chinese means something in abundance

Keshab Sigdel is a Nepali poet, editor, translator, academic and rights activist. An International Committee Member of the World Poetry Movement, he teaches poetry at Tribhuvan University.

Lopamudra Basu

Phoenix park, eau claire, wisconsin

In September, we walk down the trail bridge till the flotsam of two rivers and rocks break into a riot of summer color— purple, white and celadon green of many shaped eggplants lying next to heirloom cherry and sun gold tomatoes, serrano, Thai and jalapenos bursting with scorching flavors transporting us to bazaars of our past. The jazz band strikes up in the central square blending with voices of neighbors, children cackling, dogs whimpering, vendors clinking change, as flowers and fruits change hands. Among neighbors and yesteryear vendors, we spot our childhood companions: water spinach, Malabar spinach, squash and zucchini blossoms, the Gourd family headed by Bottle and Snake. We hug them like tender familiars, who would think we would find them so far north— in this cold land’s short growing season? Soon we will be in our home to blend this bounty into concoctions smelling of Calcutta summers. kitchens warm with sizzling mustard oil, spluttering of cumin and peppers, white rice on dark green banana leaves bordered with fragrant sides. Before we leave, an old woman in a stall gives us extra mint and basil, “as a gift.” a refugee from another country, not our own, her garden and her sweat transform our new country to our old.

Hiroshima

One year ago. we hung folded paper cranes on the arch, near which boys and girls in school uniform sang songs of peace One year, since the fountains danced in the Peace Park silhouetted by the surviving dome of the epicenter. One year since we shed tears at the distorted metal lunch box in a case, next to Shin’s misshapen tricycle, surviving seventy years after the young boy who rode it, vaporized in seconds while others with burning bodies jumped into the seven rivers, chasing the illusion of relief. One year since we found the one- legged Shinto shrine or the old ash trees, mute witnesses for seventy years. The voices of the museum staff and survivors in their eighties grow faint Yet I return to you Hiroshima, as Susan Sarandon narrates on screen the old picture book of the deadly flash, liquid fires on rivers, bodies stripped of kimonos heaped near Miyajima and child clutching her chopstick, three days after biting into onigiri for breakfast. As the bullet train winds to your twin, the old port city of Nagasaki, girdled by the East China Sea and resting just below the peninsula of countries warring for nearly seventy years, where fierce bombs that can cross oceans and continents are the bargaining chips of powerful regimes ruling over hungry farmers. One year later, I touch the origami paper and cherry blossom incense sticks in my treasure chest of memories, holding the paper crane earring to my face, I see in the mirror, Mii’s mother on a river of fire.

Victor Pogadaev & Anna Pogadaeva Kemala’s poems from the view of international literary criteria

Every comparison is lame. It is difficult to compare the work of two talented authors because the work of each author reflects his unique personality. It is impossible, for example, to compare Leo Tolstoy's work "War and Peace" with Ivan Turgenev's work "Fathers and children". Both works by themselves are good, work on the actual theme and in terms of language also denigrate the rich and perfect literary language. It may be good to compare not the work but the influence of the work on the development of literature and the development of culture and society in general. If for example in the framework of a country this writer or that introduces innovation, a new way of writing then with that he enriches literature. And especially the importance of literary contribution to the development of culture and society. According to Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, poetry can be " bombs and banners". For proof we do not need to go far. In Indonesia, for example, the Taufiq Ismai’s poem I‘m shame to be an Indonesian in addition to the poem The Land of Tears by Sutardji and the old poems by Rendra including Blues For Bonnie became the banner of the struggle against the Soeharto regime and actually "made the 1998 Revolution" - their poems were heard in the meeting , processions, demonstrations (Victor Pogadaev, 2010: 13).

But of course through observation of world literature we can reveal certain criteria or characteristics that show the correlation of certain author's works with the international literary level. For example, diversity of themes, humanism, the subtlety and beauty of language, breadth of views, concern about the state of society and the situation in the world in general, reflections about the place of a poet in the international context. How can Kemala's works be evaluated in the context of the international literary criteria? We start with the concern about the state of society. The Malay poets always respond actively to the social and political events around them. They often protest against things that are considered inappropriate or unfair. Such their stand is often criticized by certain parties. According to these parties, poets should not mix politics with art, and poetry should not contain elements of propaganda and protest. But poets are good at raising every theme including political themes in such a way that poetry does not lose the beauty of its poetic language. Especially after achieving independence, all important events were straight away reflected in the creativity of Malaysian poets. In newspapers and magazines, many protest poems were published. Apart from that, several collections of poems were produced, for example, Keranda / Coffin (1967), Kebangkitan /Revival (1969), Suara Tujuh /The Voice of Seven (1969), Teluk Gong / Bay of Gong (1967) and others. One of the most important topics was the hard fate of Malay peasants who defended their right for land, as in the Kemala’s poem Tanah dan Rakyat / Land and People: From the interior deep to the feet of intense life The eye-popping story that hinders The position of the weak behind false dialogue Inhale and wake up next In action!

(Gong Bay, 1969: 41) The poem above is the voice and statement of Kemala's attitude about farmers and land which is a social economic problem in his homeland from north Perlis to the banks of the Straits of Teberau.

The poet protested against the unjust system concerning the poor and oppressed indigenous people. The poem reflects Kemala's sympathy for the farmers who captured the land to provide the existence for their families.

The same socio-economic problems are mentioned in the Bay of Gong poetry: You and I are no different We are the tongue, we are the eyes and we are the voice Brothers, we both lost in the mother land If there is no rise & understanding & rise We would be good material for laugh The children of the paralyzed age Will die in the killing room without oxygen! (Gong Bay, 1969: 39) The poem above is full of Kemala’s emotions. He used a new way to present his idea, which was to appear on behalf of the farmers themselves.

In the collaction of poems Voices of Seven, the poet proves that poetry should not be limited to high motives and far from everyday life alone but should reflect the reality of life whether the reality is good or bad. In his poem Bunga Taksiah / The mourning flower Kemala notes:

Luther King, because you stand on the side of humanity Sea songs become the solid songs of your life The independent angina song is always aging There is no boundary between and distances Man is increasingly careless on the first day of his birth. Because you are a fighter then you rise From shackles and gloomy dreams Servants in the fields of cotton, wheat and wine Lincoln's will anesthetized carefully The word brotherhood is desired now in the soles of the feet.

………………………………………… Luther King, because you stand by human rights Sea songs accompany the sympathy of sympathy The windy caress caresses the lonely cross

There is no final kiss for a noble heart The fragrant history that records nothing can be buried. (Voice of Seven, 1969: 42) This poem reflects the breadth of the poet's views. He did not limit himself to the problems faced by his country only and looked at the world with open eyes. As a representative of his time he tried to find answers to the demands and challenges of his time. It is important to look at the influence of the surrounding conditions on Kemala in the poetry collection Manifestasi / Manifestation (1982) in which Kemala appeared as an editor and one of the authors. The poetry collection is a reaction to Israel's policy against Lebanon and reflects the concern of Kemala and several other Malaysian poets of the fate of the nation being invaded by Israel with the support of a superpower. Right then and there Kemala and Usman Awang led the movement of solidarity with the Palestinians in Malaysia with the aim of mobilizing the community to support fellow believers in the Middle East. Kemala, among others, wrote many articles in magazines and newspapers. In one of the articles we can read: Certainly the struggle of Muslims in Lebanon attracted the attention of Malay poets. The brutal actions of the Zionists who tried to destroy Islamic values have never happened in history before. Accordingly, the Malay poets through their poetry express protest against such acts (Kemala, 1982). His poem Sajak Subuh / Morning Poem (Manifestasi, 1982: 30) contained in the collection proves the truth of his words. The rhythm of the poem, the repetition of the most important words, the use of Islamic terms closely intertwined with the metaphorical scene of the problem perfectly show the heartache of Kemala who fully sympathizes with the fighters for freedom and independence. No less important is Kemala's activities to support the Bosnian and Herzegovina. The theme became one of the main themes of the World Poetry Reading in Kuala Lumpur in 1994 whose organizer was Kemala. In the framework of the International Poetry Festival, a meeting was held with Bosnian female poet Aishah Zahirovich. Kemala himself recited a poem in which he

appeared enthusiastically to defend the Muslims in the country by condemning the policy of non-interference of the great powers: Bomb has been dropped on Bosnia But Paris is silent, London is silent, Moscow is silent, Washington is silent… (Poetry Recitation, 1994) Now the poetry of protest is not so often in Kemala's work. But from time to time events in the world raise his concerns. It is reflected in his poetry, sometimes unexpectedly. For example, as in his poem Berangkatlah, Bang / Go with peace, Brother read by Kemala at the day of memory of Usman Awang on 4 January 2002 (and again at the launch of Usman Awang's book Turunnya Sebuah Bendera / Descent of the Flag on 1 September 2007). In it, Kemala said goodbye to the great poet through words that were very sad and full of respect and love. But his mind was focused on the problems of the country, the suffering of the people who have always been the focus of Usman Awang's poetry as well, as reflected in the following passage: Go with peace, Brother May you be at peace with Divine poetry This world is full of suffering Our people remain black with their suffering “The Suffering of One Nation” Only you cry about it Fragmented, fragmented the fate of our nation, my friend, Like a trophy cracked into million peaces

But Kemala does not stop here. As a true Muslim he could not help but mention what happened in the Islamic world in general including the fate of Osama bin Laden: Thank you Brother, you are the best gift Given by God for the poets and the Malays Gentle but humane, Kind like Mak Sirandung

But that is our nation, Brother, Missing oarsmen and leaders Occasionally very stubborn Deceived by сolonizers, Look at the fate of Osama bin Laden

(Lyna Usman, 2007: 14-15) It may be that the mention of Osama bin Laden's name is out of place. But so is the poet's vision, so is his inspiration. According to Kemala himself: “The poet is not a politician, in his heart there is no political reason to change and adapt to the demands of the times and circumstances. A poet is a poet. He is a personality. Humanism and love - that's what worries him first. Though the boundaries between countries, races, skin color are not important to him ... Social and political motives must have a place in poetry. But the balance between the material aspect and the spiritual aspect is the most important issue”. Thus, protest poetry belongs to the thinking and conceptual aspects of the author. It helps to trace the intertextual relationship in Kemala poetry that is the relationship between the events that take place in the world and its poetry. The protest poems also show the extent to which events in his country and in this world influence poets and the extent to which those events are reflected in his poetry. Certainly the theme of concern about the state of society is closely related to the theme of humanism and the breadth of views reflected in the intertext elements in Kemala's work (Anna Pogadaeva, 2011). He bases his poems on the literary treasures of his own country and the world created before but does not stop here but moves forward by developing traditions, especially elements of Sufism and Islam. Kemala's contribution in the field is also extraordinary and in line with international literary trends that pay more attention to the phenomenon of Islamic revival in the world. He subtly and poetically explains the essence of Islam, trying to instill the love of God in the hearts of readers.

By expressing his high wishes, Kemala recorded many historical events sourced from the Quran. He himself admitted that he

studied the Qu'an a lot. In this regard, Yahya M.S., among others, said that "The Quran has become a source of fire and water for poets to say something about life as a servant of God" (Yahya M. S., 1981). In the poem Di hadapan al-Quran / In front of the Quran Kemala describes the recitation of the holy Al-Quran surah by the Muslims who are quietly are sitting on the floor. Their eyes were filled with tears because of great love for God. The image reflects the Majesty of God who promises to the followers of eternal paradise that is beauty and absolute harmony. Kemala is filled with feelings and waiting for unending love, as shown in this passage: quench the thirst, ulama pat my heart subtle and holy grow to be stable once. (Kemala, 1983: 3) This longing and thirst are even more evident in the Kemala’s poem R itu Rindu / L is for Longing (Kemala 1983: 4), as explained by Shahnon Ahmad: The longing that is "unexpectedly present, not immersed in meaning", "unstoppable in its arrival, unstoppable in its wounds", "unstoppable in its current, unobstructed in its coming" grows at a time when thousands of miles away from those who are loved but who are loved only as the symbols simply because the peak of longing is Allah (Shahnon Ahmad, 1983: 12). Meanwhile, the poet understands that it is common for human beings to show various emotions and feelings that are sometimes very vague. He sought to understand human instincts by observing the history of human life based on the Quran. In the poem Nama /Name, Kemala refers to surah 15 (Al-Hijr) by describing how God gives knowledge to human beings: and the spiritual aspect is the most important issue. Asmaulhusna When Adam was made by God he was taught the secret of the Name

When God asked all the angels to prostrate prostrate the angel upholding the command of Rabbul’izati except Satan who was proud of himself "I am from the light Adam from the earth Isn’t my dignity Higher the one of Adam? God's wrath against Satan was indescribable. "If you are right Tell me the secret of the Name!” The devil swallowed his own words what he could say about the Name?” When the same question was put to Adam He quickly answered to it. The wicked devil Was casted from the Divine throne bringing black revenge to destroy the descendants of Adam. “Go! I give you permission To seduce people but my servants are steadfast in their faith It is impossible for you to deceive them!” The devil is gone passed with the curse as dark as revenge. (Kemala, 1983: 73) In the poem above, the poet describes how Adam who was made of earth and then blown by the spirit of God by God himself was a great work. Then when man is perfect (the result of the merger between earth and spirit) he is given the right to choose. Adam was given the right to choose with all the facilities available, both in himself or in nature, to either miss the face of God or to be with Satan in Hell forever. Among the main facilities taught by Allah to Adam are the knowledge here called Name. It is also interesting that the poem is similar to the poem of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin who lived in the 19th century.

This poem entitled Prorok /Prophet in which the birth of a poet is described. God gave him eyes to see but he was not still a poet. God gave him ears to hear but he was not still a poet. God replaced his heart but he was still "dead in the desert". God gave him the ability to understand God and only then he became a poet (Victor Pogadaev, 2003: 17) The creativity of Kemala’s poetry is very diverse. As he himself once said, human beings as the intelligent creation of Allah SWA in the world are responsible not only for themselves but for all people, nations and the whole world. By focusing on philosophical motives, Kemala tries to show how he himself is considerate of people in need of protection and help. Sympathize with them and try to elevate the world to the core understanding of philosophy from the inner and the outer.

Kemala's poetry is filled with the energy that he scoops up in the world around him and after absorbing that energy he releases it while strengthening it so that his poem becomes a great event in literature. Thus Kemala reveals to us the essence of things and events that are not seen by eyes. The poet seems to be trying to tap into the heart of a reader, showing him all the uniqueness of human life, making us believe in the magic contained in words. Kemala's poems are full of music and deep rhythm. He skillfully uses the capabilities of the Malay language by taking from the language sometimes soft sounds, sometimes expressive and explosive sounds. He fills every line of his poetry with movement and makes every poem a living organism. The unity of feelings and high dreams infused with infinite love for God is the relentless source of Kemala's creative inspiration. His poetry is the fusion of images and music, avangardism and traditional Sufi motifs as well as rhythmic forms of folk poetry. Nature and man are two components that are inseparable from each other. Everything in nature has its value and symbolic meaning. Environmental symptoms became the symbolic language against a Sufi background. For example in the poem Laut /The Sea, Kemala symbolically describes his journey to his inner “I”, as follows:

I am the sea beautiful girl sleeping in her bed ripples on my body painting seconds and wind dance united in the rustling want this far away serenity I am the sea agile youth brought up by time the waves crashing into words roar reaching the horizon music stranded to the coral fortress then get to know itself noon option concluded the seagull's sing history passes I love your language I am the first sea the nurturer of eternal love

betting night a mighty storm embraced my presence secret and omnipotent scattered by the discoverer of meaning for the sake of space and time I am the sea, song’s owner grandmother's love, grandchildren’s playfull eyes meet here the far wind seeks harmony trembling lips in tafsir here: in my heart, my dear self-esteem volatiles.

(Kemala, 1975: 44) As translators of Kemala's poetry we are always challenged by his poetry but also really enjoy the work because we feel the beauty and purity of his language. Kemala's activity received recognition at home and abroad, which also shows that his works are international in nature. He won the

Malaysian Literary Prize / Prime Literary Prize (1972, 1982/83, 1995, 1999), SEA Write Award, Thailand (1986,), Dato 'Paduka Mahkota Award (2001), Pujangga Title, UPSI (2003), Literary Award Darul Ehsan of Selangor (2005), Abdul Rahman 'Auf Award (2006), Utusan Ecxon Literary Prize (for several years), National Literary Prise (2011). Kemala’s poetry was also published in international publications such as Horison (Indonesia), Hemisphere (Australia), Asiaweek (Hong Kong), and Pacific Journal (New Zealand). In Russia alone his works were translated quite broad: poetries Coral and Sea are contained in an anthology of traditional and modern Malay poetry Ruchei / Brook (1996). In 2001, the book Selected Poems of Kemala was published (Kemala, 2001). Poems Kata /Words; Buku /Book; Mim 27 were published in the magazine Asia and Africa Today in 2008. Poems Ada /There are; Buku /Books; Mim 42 were included into the book Pokoryat Vishinu / To Сonquer the Heights where the poems of Malaysian and Indonesian poets were collected (2009). And finally the important motive that characterizes all international authors is reflection on their own activities, the role of their work and their place in this world. The theme also reflects the maturity of a writer. As a responsible and sensitive poet Kemala couldn’t ignore the theme. The theme is traced in many Kemala’s poems but especially is evident in the poem MIM-40 where he passionately expresses gratitude to God because he was chosen to be a poet: Shukur, you have chosen me for survival Shukur, you for choosing me to be a man of words, a poet who understands the language of the moon, water, sun, snow waves, celestial bodies, mountains, weeds, seagulls Shukur, you led me swimming in the sea Permitted to wear the clothes Of your love, me, sad and miserable after tasting the khuldi of the forbidden garden Throat stuck in thorns must be spitted out, and blood splashes, intensed nestapa

delicious love the poems are silent because not been written Thank you for choosing me for not just drowning in an old cave MIM from time to time from continent to continent leveling the experience Thankfully I'm still here can feel smooth and rough of the waves the squeaky song of slender dove Shukur Shukur you have chosen me (Kemala, 1999) Conclusion

The analysis of Kemala's creative work shows that his works demonstrate the diversity of themes, the concern for the state of society itself and the world as well as the broadness of the poet's views, humanistic in nature, highlighted by the subtlety and richness of language and reflection on the role of poets which are in accordance with international standards. We think that Malaysia should be proud to have a poet like Kemala and I hope that his work in accordance with his National Laurat’s status will be more widely translated into the world language. There is no need to hide talented poets who are potentially capable to receive the Nobel Prize from the world community.

Bibliografi Anna Pogadaeva (2011). Intertekstualiti Dalam Puisi Kemala (Intertextuality In Kemala’s Poetry). Editor Irwan Abu Bakar dan Victor A. Pogadaev. Kuala Lumpur: eSastera Enterprise. Kemala (1975). Era. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Kemala (1982). “Manifestasi Penyair Melayu Terhadap Lubnan Nak Disusun” (The MANIFESTASI of Malay Poets about Lebanon will be Prepared"- “Berita Minggu”, 8 August, Kuala Lumpur. Kemala (1983). ‘Ayn. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Kemala (1999). Mim. Kumpulan Puis. (Mim. Poetry Collection). Kuala Lumpur:

Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Kemala (2001). Stikhi. Iz sbornikov raznikh let (Poems. From Various Collections). Trabslated from Malay by Pogadaev V.A and Pogadaeva A.V. Preface by Pogadaeva A.V. Moskow: Humanitary. Lyna Usman (2007). Usman Awang, Sasterawan Negara (Usman Awang, National Laureat). Kuala Lumpur: UA Enterprises Sdn. Bhd. Manifestasi (1982). Disusun oleh Kemala, Rizi S.S., Ahmad Razali. Kuala Lumpur: Persatuan Penulis Nasional Malaysia. Pengucapan Puisi Dunia (1994) (World Poetry Reading), 13-18 Oktober, Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Shahnon Ahmad (1983). Kata Pengantar dlm. kumpulan puisi Kemala Ayn ( Foreword in Kemala Ayn poetry collection). Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Suara Tujuh (1969). Kumpulan sajak-sajak tujuh penyair tanah air. (The Voice of Seven. A collection of poems by seven poets of the homeland). Kuala Lumpur: Setia Murni. Teluk Gong (Bay of Gong) (1969). Penyunting Usman Awang. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka. Victor Pogadaev (2003). Penyair Agung Rusia Pushkin dan Dunia Timur (Great Russian poet Pushkin and the Eastern World). Monograph Series. Centre For Civilisational Dialogue. University Malaya. N 6. Victor Pogadaev (2010). “Penyambung lidah orang miskin dan tertindas” (The mouthpeace of the poor and oppressed) – Taufiq Ismail. Kembalikan Indonesia Padaku (Return Indonesia To Me). Moscow: “Klyuch-S.” Yahya M. S. (1981). “Konsep Islam dalam Kesusasteraan Melayu Moden” (The concept of Islam in the Modern Malay Literature). – “Bahana”, Jil. 16, Bil. 34, April.

Professor Dr. Victor A. Pogadaev, Vice-President of Nusantara Society, Lomonosov Moscow State University Anna Pogadaeva is a Russian researcher and translator. She graduated from the Institute of Asian and African studies, Moscow Lomonosov State University.

HS Shivaprakash

The sound of whose footsteps

The sound of whose footstep was it The kreemkling of whose anklet was it That descended from the star-strewn firmament Into my ears trembling in trepidation When, I had hidden myself furtively Out of fear of rebirth In the earthen womb of the earth When death was playing football with it Was it the footstep of death that I heard? Or the klingling of death’s anklet bell? The kreenkrounging of the anklet.. My frightened eyes could not gather courage To look in that direction

‘Look up! Become courage If you have any left’ Said the voice of thunder In the cloudless sky Having waited and waited centuries Weary of nothing happening I at last looked up A century and two millennia later When courage bounced up like a ball From the abysm of fear I saw all along the firmament and beyond The sky-wide arch of your feet Wearing countless specs of stars Like grains of dust Tell me O dancer Drunken with dance of death

Appearing to me dimly From behind the curtain Of blinding constellations How can any planet or star Escape your tyranny and trampling? I heard: ‘None at all Unless those foetuses in the womb of death Cling to the colossal arch In at his endless space In this time beyond time..’

The same eyes the same expanses

When I, then a mason,was building a temple In a dream city now asleep underneath one of the seven oceans, You appeared suddenly before me And, wiping sweat from my brow with your delicate hands, You gifted me a heavenly flower Saying: ‘I cannot stay with you, So I am leaving this unfading flower..’ I remember how you came but not how you went In this wakeful dream at this dawn of a new poem After the rise and fall of so many empires So many floods, holocausts, earthquakes, wars and pandemics.. Even the flower you promised to be unfading Has disappeared But its invisible and irresistible fragrance Is still chasing and guiding me Through so many deaths and rebirths, dissolutions and creations Towards a new hope, a new dawn Look! The gates are now open! Another great beginning

The same eyes The same expanses The same sight the same might The same light the same days The same seas The same waves The same sighs The same shores The same wait The ripe fruit The same valleys The same peaks The same stars The void voidkess The same temples The vacant lots The same horoscope The same death will Sumptuous feats In burning ghats So different, your eyes then So exhausted, your eyes now The same objects The same images

HS Shivaprakash was born Bangalore, India. Professor, Theatre and Performance Studies, JNU, New Delhi . Author of 9 books of poems, 15 plays and 3 critical works in Kannada. Winner of the prestigious Rajyotsava Award from Karnataka State(2006) and Sangeet Natak Akademi Award from National Theatre Akademi (1997) and Sahitya Akademi(2012)

Vadim Terekhin

It’s well known that

It’s well-known that In accordance with all laws of nature, Water is unseen and dead On entering the supply network. And waits to be rescued until It starts flowing through pipes. Water, like the language of poetry, Can’t live in captivity. It’s devoted to flowing, To pressure hidden in the chest. And always beats its way Out of any kind of captivity. And if you take a look at water, Compare it to our own meagre experience: As soon as it breaks loose into freedom, Water becomes alive.

Translated from Russian by Jenny Wade

Word and music

Do you hear, the cricket starts A song on a baked lyre. No matter how cruel the world is Word and music are eternal.

We are born to be lost. Canet in endless darkness Fame, wealth and power. Word and music are eternal.

How can we live on earth Just, slowly, cordially? In a world that lies in evil Word and music are eternal.

Life fits into seven notes. But in the fleeting vanity Everything in this world will pass. Word and music are eternal.

Vadim Terekhin - poet, Co-chairman of the Russian writers ' Union, Vice-President of the international Academy of Russian literature (Moscow). Corresponding member of the Petrovskaya Academy of Sciences and arts (Saint Petersburg), full member of the Academy of Russian literature (Moscow), full state adviser of the second class of the Kaluga region.

Gerry Loose

Where is the clang

of this spade on stone where is the fruit of the tree that made this shaft

where is the fire and rod that made beads of weld on this steel

I stole the soft mist it was mine always I stole the air from the wind it never knew

I stole the heron’s gaze she had fished enough tell me : what can I take, what cannot be taken

A valentine for morven

of roses, yes & hyacinths & amaryllis all the forget-me-nots & snowdrops as well as stolen fruits

this is the fifth the fifth fourteenth of the one thousand nine hundred & forty four days

eighteen or so million heart beats seeding significance only to a man in love who else counts as growing plants each shared passing second impermanent, perfect

Tarik Sujat

I Have Embraced Death Before My Birth

In memory of the unborn child, Michelangelo, of the pregnant Italian mother Simona Monti1 who was killed in the Gulshan massacre on July 1, 2016 I have embraced death before my birth. I have no land, no language, no nation of my own. I see so distinction between vice and virtue, religion and irreligion. Seeing the gruesome face of life I had swallowed my cry before I was born. My first breath did in no way poison The atmosphere of this earth. My last breath is the first reward The earth has given me! Mother, You are my only toyhouse, my school and my coffin. My eyes hadn’t yet formed, still I could see The sharp claws of the killer tearing apart my navel. Before my ears took shape, I could hear The bells ringing the end of my school day That strange sound died down slowly echoing From the minarets of mosques, temples and churches. The first bed I had is my final bed. My mother's womb is the only corner Of a home of my unseen earth. There, too, a thick darkness descended And I tried to keep afloat on a river of blood Holding on to the umbilical cord of my mother. But my little hand and my soft fingers Couldn’t find anything to hold on to My eyes, still not open, saw The Quran, the Bible, the Geeta and the Tripitak Floating away in the current of blood, in the brutal carnage of death. In the near dark world of mine without colours I could not learn how to read a holy alphabet. Still even before my birth I embraced death.

My mother's womb is my first grave, My first coffin, my first pyre. This earth of human’s race burst into flames And a few drops of my blood cannot quench its thirst! Translated by Mohammad Nurul Huda

Love for Language

Till then, we hadn’t heard about St. Valentine’s Day On a scorching spring day, the morning walked Alongside the processions the city streets The ever familiar sunshine, the fiery flowers On the trees, the eager sky, On that day the city dwellers were busy with their daily grinds; The lawns of Ramna radiated with intense warmth, The adorable birds were tweeting their ever-known trills No one could think in their wildest thoughts That people could be shot while Rallying for their language and love Not even in one’s wildest thoughts one could think Of being shot for showing love for language Still, Dhaka air was thickened by the smell of gunpowder And hyenas’ claws; In murmurs of numerous voices It was written in serene letters “The birth of a nation” The infinite saga of love for language February 21st … Translated by Shuborna Chowdhury

Tarik was born in Bangladesh. Tarik Sujat emerged in the landscape on modern Bengali poetry in the 1980s. His mastery of lyric produces appealing music in poetry. By profession he is an award-winning graphic designer and an entrepreneur in the field of design and media. He has five publications to his credit. For his poetry, Tarik was honoured with the prestigious Krittibash Award from India. Tarik is now the General Secretary of National Poetry Council, Bangladesh.

Sushanta Bhattacharjee

Poetic imagery

Words are oscillating with images And symbols by its vibration In the texture of poetry With its versification From the heart of consciousness Containing poetic imagery. Poetic imagery has blended The finite and the infinite To express the surrealism Of life in its eternal aspects. Poetic imagery has hidden truths Inside its occult chambers of lairs By fencing eternity from the cosmic time To form the word – a mighty inspiring voice.

Social distancing

The social distancing is alienated me From my friends – a jerk in my life. Is it Brecht’s Absurdity in life! Or Marx’s Theory of Alienation? But emotionally I am a disturbed person At present because of the Lockdown Because of Coronavirus Pandemic Because of huge death due to Covid 19. Worldwide – a dreaded Virus Surfaced from Wuhan city of China.

Sushanta Bhattacharjee is a bi-lingual poet in India. He writes poems in both English and Bengali. He is the editor of 'Suchetana' little magazine. He publishes two Bengali and one English poetry book.

Amanita Sen

The smell of death

That to me was the first smell of death. As we passed by the crematorium in our school-bus, those pre-electric incinerator days, the waft of lit funeral pyres struck me. It stood out incongruently from the seamless blend of erratic heart-beats for lessons not learnt for the classes, and the girly gossip. Like a sudden change to high pitch of musical notes from the easy, practiced lower ones, the smell felt sharp, but part of the journey. Death feels odourless now, a few high-strung notes of grief blends with life, as much the part of this journey.

The metal-urn speaks

The glitz from my body will wane off soon.

The broken edge will highlight the lusterless form, my tired demeanour; yet, those of you who know of my days of glory, wish to hold on to its flitting shine, like a drinker does to his hangovers, I hope you wake up to the rigid truth of petered out things.

What remains of me, then, when the polish is gone, is my unsoldered, raw being. Can you then, for once hold me close to your heart and from my cracked lips, drink?

She has published two volumes of poetry, “Candle In My Dream” and “What I don’t Tell you”. Her works have been published in numerous journals, both online and print versions. She is a mental health worker living in Kolkata, India.

Takir Hossain

Three important poets of sixties in Bangladesh

Poetry plays a significant role in shaping the literary landscape of a nation. Bangladeshi poetry has a significant presence in the history of Bangladeshi literature and the 1960s, in particular, was a landmark for Bengali poetry. During that period, many poets started their voyages through new trends and novel approaches. Over the last few decades, Bangladeshi poetry went though a number of changes in the fields of theme, subject-matter as well as technique. The transformation of Bengali poetry also happens for socio-political and economic reasons. And the transformation has been a continuing process for Bangladeshi poetry. Mahadev Saha, Sikdar Aminul Haq and Rafiq Azad are among the most significant poets of the 1960s in our country. Their poems are strong, contemplative and very contemporary in their ways of expressions, articulations of dictions and structures. In my article, I have tried to focus on their genres, inherent thought-processes and lyrical contents. Mahadev Saha is one of the foremost poets of the late '60s, an era marked with accomplishments and revolutionary ideas. He claims to be introverted and has no interest in personal relationships. Saha is also one of the leading romantic poets in contemporary Bengali literature. He is also a poet of mystery and muted

ambiance. Since he took to poetry, he has carefully removed himself from any disquiet and unsteadiness. His love for beauty and nature comes through in a very animated and intimate manner in his canvas of poetry. Mahadev Saha was born on August 5, 1944 in Dhanghara, Sirajganj. The only child of parents Godadhor Saha and Birajmohini, Mahadev completed his primary and high school education in his village. For higher education he went to Dhaka College, Bogra College and Rajshahi University. The main elements in Saha's poetry are solitude, love, yearning, the Liberation War, scenic beauty, poverty, secularism and equal rights. The struggles and sorrows of the deprived spur him to write. The poet is deeply moved by the ravages of poverty. His style is unquestionably unique and evocative. His words and verses articulate the torments of a lonesome soul and a mourning heart. Mahadev Saha is dreamy and given to flights of poetic fantasy. Besides being a visionary, the poet has regularly tried to express his personal feelings and observations in romanticism. One will read “Prem O Bhalobashar Kobita” avidly; and out of that experience one can easily read the poet's mind and bore into his soul. It is true that the meaning of love differs from one individual to another. Expressions of love come to poetry, indeed hold it aloft, in various forms. The rendering of love is very clear in the poems. His love for feminine beauty and natural objects comes in tandem with the frustrations and dissatisfaction associated with modern life.

After a close perusal of Saha's poetry, though it is very difficult to trace the exact silhouette of the poet's mind, one is quite clear about the fact that he is a modernist in the complete sense of the meaning. In his poems, one feels the lament of a lonely soul, an underlying sorrow, a feeling of emptiness but not without a tinge of hard realities and other realisations that one can call forth only from life itself.

Mahadev's first book “Ei Griha Ei Sannyas” was published in 1972. His second book “Chai Bish, Amorata” was published in 1975. He has published 130 books including poetry, essays, books

for children, compilations of poems and a number of volumes of selected poems. The ‘magician of words’ has won many prestigious awards like Ekushey Padak, Bangla Academy Award, Zebunnesa-Mahabubllah Award, Alaol Shahitya Award and Khalekdad Chowdhury Smriti Padak. Sikdar Aminul Haq is generally a modernist Bangladeshi poet. He is also a prolific poet and his poems are of outstanding intellectual quality. Incidents of everyday life can be found in much of his poetry but in a very symbolic and complicated way. He frequently experiments with form and content. He often approaches surrealism and expressionism in his works. He uses the imagery of varied urban motifs and infrequently rural motifs like moon, sun, sky, lush greenery, clouds and other natural wonders in his poetry. His poetry shows a considerable degree of social awareness and a sense of satire. His works also focus on Dhaka's contemporary life and times.

Sikdar Aminul Haq was born on December 6, 1942. He is a recipient of the Bangla Academy Award in 1994 for poetry and many other prestigious awards. His breakthrough came with his commendable work “Satata Danar Manush”. The poet is popular for the handling of unusual, whimsical and innovative imagery in his creations.

Aminul Haq’s poetry has superbly documented pains, agonies, weal and woe of human beings, historical and political episodes in our country. His poems are distinguished for their highly expressive and communicative, poignant and symbolic traits. For inspiration, Aminul Haq veers towards human life and their varied social and cultural aspects, patriotism, political ups and downs. Aminul Haq's poems are courageous, thought-provoking and intellectually rich. His protest against religious intolerance has been reflected in his poetry. Several of Aminul’s poems are conceptual and some deal with death, romance and at times the absurd. As an experimental poet, he frequently changed his technique, mode and overall substance.

Aminul Haq’s notable works are ‘Duurer Karnish’, ‘Teen Papreer Phul’, ‘Parabat Ei Pracheerer Shes Kabita’, ‘Ami Sei Electra’, ‘Bohudin Upekhae Bohudin Aundhokarey’, ‘Patrey Tumi Protidin Jol’, ‘Ek Ratri Ek Writu’, ‘Satata Danar Manush’, ‘Suprobhat Hei Varanda’, ‘Kafkar Jama’, ‘Sulata Amar Elsa’, ‘Rumaler Alo O Onnanno Kabita’, ‘Lorkakey Jedin Ora Niye Gelo’, ‘Bimorsho Tatar’, ‘Ishitar Ondhokar Shue Ache’. The poet died in 2003. One of the most brilliant stars to have emerged in the tumultuous environment of the post-liberation era, Rafiq Azad forged a unique voice. The Liberation War in 1971 remained a focal point for this rebel who never flinched from critiquing the misrules and inhumanities he was witness to. As a voice against injustice his poetics relied on familiar themes echoing a constant craving for a just society while his form was fragmentary and was easily accommodative to invectives. His strong, intense verses often dealt with political, social issues seen through the prism of the personal. A freedom fighter, he developed a signature style, distinguished by simple linguistic constructions where there were no division between high and low art sensibilities. As a man Azad was liberal-minded - an amicable secularist. Though a diehard atheist he believed in the rights of believers in all religions. As a poet he was out-spoken, bold and uncompromising in his stance.

Azad is most renowned for his poem “Bhaat De Haramjada”. The inflammable verses of the poem, especially the fiery last line ‘Bhaat Dey Haramjada, Ta Na Hole Maanchitro Khabo’ (Give me food bastard, or, I will gobble up the map!) sparked controversy immediately after it was published in 1974. The insinuation of the poem was that the newly independent country failed to feed its own people and the famine that had struck the Northern region was a man-made one. There were clear hints that the poet responded to pictures of the emaciated Rangpur girl Basanti found wrapped in a fishing-net alongside a hungry beggar eating vomit of an alleged cholera patient, who were all over the media. Azad was born on February 14, 1943, in a remote area called Guni, under Tangail district. He completed his primary education under

the British-Indian education system from Sadhuty Middle English School. He developed a keen interest in writing poems since his early childhood. On completion of school certificate exam, Azad enrolled at Government Saadat College, Karotia. His first book of poetry “Ashombhober Paye” was published in 1973. Since that first spark of self-confessional poetics, Azad’s style of expression went through changes in the course of the next forty or so years. It became more personal, lyrical and romantic. However, a greater portion of his work depicts poverty, sufferings, injustice, inhumanity, collapsing of urban and rural lives as well as the political turmoil, social and economic crises that rocked the region. Rafiq has fourty-four publications under his name, including an autobiography. His notable works include ‘Prokriti O Premer Kabita’, ‘Shahasra Shundor’, ‘Haturir Nichey Jibon’, ‘Khub Beshi Dureo Nai’, ‘Khama Karo Bahoman Hay Udar Omiyo Batas’, ‘Apar Arannya, Karo Ashuro Paat’, ‘Moulobir Mon Bhalo Nay’ and ‘Pagoler Thekay Premikar Chithi’. Azad received Ekushey Padak in 2013 and Bangla Academy Award in 1984 for his outstanding contributions to poetry. The poet died in 2016.

Takir Hossain is an art critic, cultural curator and Journalist.

Habibullah Sirajee

A lecture on health

For a change of health some go to the beach Accompanied by their wives. Their objective: to wrap around their body and mind A vigorous climate, live healthily, And pull the wagon of their years Close to the frontier to some hilly spot. Thus some regain their health, Get back the joy of physical union in the salty and fresh air, The necessary taste of fulfilment. Some, even as they feel the favourable environment, See on the wet sand a sick sunset, The brown back of crabs, and slippery oysters. Everything is natural, And thus all automatic actions Go on happening naturally: The roar of the sea The restless flutter of the breeze The intimacy of the snow The rise and fall of the waves.

For a change of soil Some run to the distant west. For a change of palate Some give up fish And pin their faith more on meat. For a change of home Some break up their homes Again and again, Changing one's clothes is, of course, A person's very personal affair. For the sake of one's health Some turn epicurean, some stoic,

Some include in their menu Chicken soup and bread and wine Or tomato and spinach. But however delightful the breeze And the water sweet and tasty, And even if there are flying clouds And captivating nature before one's eyes There is still something lacking, Something absent … Certain problem-ridden monetary matters Invariably control the climate And the hills and valleys and plains In a very sanitary manner.

Translated by Kabir Chowdhury

Tiger

Imprisoned within black bars The two eyes of a black tiger watches for twenty one years. It only sees the knife thrower's game, The sleights of hand, and the monkey's trick. This tiger once roamed free in the jungle, It loved the deep sylvan shadows, Water, brimming and shining, the free wind. This tiger loved the harvest on the field, Dewey with the seat of labour, The dropping fruit trees, flower pollens. This tiger talked a lot about himself, Sang songs to be alive, like one's own self. But a hunter one day, leased the whole forest, The tip of the knife became moist And then wet with fresh blood. And interned within the cage A continent's time increases but truth increases even more. The cage of the tiger increases, Black and white skins are incensed.

The tiger sees the earth, The snake's tongue sees the flame. The tiger sees death, and death itself then looks at life.

Translated by Afsan Chowdhury

A painting of humanity

With a gush of cold air from Africa's woodlands I have come to meet you; With a can of milk from Australia I have come to your abode; would you let me sit for a while? I have chocolates, cashew nuts from South America, clothes and toys from Europe I wish to live in amity with you all. I am the green of Bangladesh I offer you the silt-filled crop-fields to sit. Love for hand extended anytime, care on every stride, Eat some rice and fish; from within dreams bring out a bit of broad sky, where a whole picture of humanity is painted life and science.

Translated by Quader Mahmud

Habibullah Sirajee was born in Bangladesh. Graduated from the Engineering University. Total number of published books is more than sixty; which includes poetry, novels, essays, memoirs & juvenile verse. Received the Ekushey Padak, the Bangla Academy Award. He was President, National Poetry Council, Bangladesh; now working as Director General, Bangla Academy.

Daya Dissanayake

Appendages

We are all appendages of appendages of appendages of appendages all linked to an untraceable entity. Yet we believe we are all independent, intelligent self-willed entities.

We are only helpless mindless soulless components without a will of our own

We cannot breakaway there is no survival no existence on our own however much we wanted to

Yet we go on dreaming of nirvana svarga paradise in this life and beyond clinging on to the illusion of life.

Gloria Gabuardi

Kingdom of words

I want a kingdom of words a river of words to wash away human misery and plant roots in my soul so that it might be an Argonaut, a Quixotic lady in fantastic seas a valiant dreamer of liberty. A kingdom of words to rearrange the movement of birds in branches to feel the color of a star the aroma of wind the spirituality of men’s passion. A kingdom of words to help me know human being, seas and stars to join my soul and my body and please my flesh. I want a kingdom of words for my soul as much as I want a vast country for my heart a free country like we’ve all imagined. A kingdom of words to seduce me and roll out from my tongue like a string of pearls at dusk in my country, A kingdom of words or a river of words overflowing, carrying everything it finds in its path a will-o-’the-wisp in my mouth a passion devouring my dreams.

To burn my lips and grant me the keys of the imagination the islands of colors and spices Amboina, Banda, Ternate and Tidore with their trunks and tragedies and adventures in the sea of lamentations of Vespuccio and Magellan To have it come to a halt before me all I need is the light of your eyes the trembling at the threshold of dreams, splashing on the white page.

Translated by Indran Amirthanayagam

Dr Gloria Gabuardi is poet, painter, member of the Board of Directors of the Granada International Poetry Festival Foundation, Nicaragua. Winner of the “Ricardo Morales Avilés” Award from the National Union of Writers (1982) for her book EN DEFENSA DEL AMOR. Her work has been translated into English, German, Italian, Romanian, Bangla and Turkish.

Gopal Lahiri

Livestream

No one leave and no one come on the bank, the boat moves farther and farther downstream for that minute, a fly-catcher sings close-by unwantedly, it’s late afternoon, The low clouds test like nowhere else the winds of possibility. peddling the story float over the rusted iron railings two perched trees grow on each other. Footprints delete Fridays from the calendar, exploring something else, or in resistance to a series of fragments, worn away as debris, the truth is completely adrift, burning out its time. Sunlit studios hang pages up, as if to display wounds, volatile margins of the walled city shape the life the unheard conversation that exists in a dusty cross road, resumes with a split reflection,

Echo space

From here we see them, the cluster of faces tuck at the corner of the pavement their hunger is repressed, their eyes dream an imaginary ship sailing them under blue sky the tea stalls give warmth. The trees record the daily footfalls we the ones from here on the balcony not there or across the road, only here smudge all the colours of the morning the collage of the brown hands, pigeons and the flute man. The blurred figures whisper to the wind the lamp posts scream and flutter near the canal bridge all prayers are shade-less, cast out from the hell, people come out from the factories their stories look out to the wire, to burning echoes.

Jisell Novas-Hill

Two poems

1. Instead you give me your creation in the middle of the night you give me inspiration when everyone sleeps your compassion surrounds me you dictate songs to my weak heart You resurrect poetry that inside of me you hid Where does your wisdom come from? I heard their criticism You in my ears you laughed while your ideas you argued with me it has been a journey because inside my dreams you introduced yourself you convicted my conscience you told me about your philosophy in which Socrates coordinating had fun repeating that the only thing “I just know that I don’t know anything” Short plato would stay in his psychology facing the riddles of life you knew what was coming and how many other wise men after they would exist they were only mortal but you would live through time solving the geometry calculating trigonometry and in the statistics of life

thank you for giving me the moon to illuminate my writing in the middle of the gloom.

2. Why love? Why not love me when I love you? Why fall in love after we break up? Why look for me when I am no longer there? Why want to see me close when I'm already so far away?

Why love? Why do you make me fall in love when I don't feel it anymore? Why ask me when I no longer answer? Why call me when the phone number changes? Why write to me when I no longer read you? Why love? Why didn’t you hold me while I was cold? Why didn’t you whisper in my ear that I was yours? Why didn't you tell me what was inside of you? Why didn't you say? I love you too! Why love? Why let me fall in love again? Why let so much time go by? Why damage our destiny? I don’t understand. Why didn't you take my hands and kiss me again? Why love?

Jisell Novas-Hill, born in the Dominican Republic from an early age resides in New York, USA. Poet, international cultural promoter. Has published the bilingual poetry book Series "God is the Verb" (El Lirio de los Valles 2016, La Rosa de Saron 2017 and El Árbol de Isai 2018). Coordinator of the World Poetry Festival in New York.

Nandita Samanta

Synthesis

I need a beam of light at the quivering corner of the conscience, and a little air to breathe a steam of wholeness into my desiccated dreams. A taste of decay plays on the palate rolling the half healed shibboleth soul, sloshing an insipid pain down the glottis. The voices from behind and fear in the mind, bend and break the synthesis of propitious tears in a chaotic inertia of a torrid antithesis.

Let a prescient beam of deliverance enhance the catharsis, my conscience since long has lived planked in dark alternatives.

Time

Those times: the time when I’m all alone; time, when I’m most prone to succumb to what is ‘Gone’ formless thoughts form in the mind, those that scale heights without pinnacles, the signals of the neurons weave intricately the loose ends of time in a tight hold, a very small portion of a latent whole! Bygones toss and turn deeply rooted in the core, the vista of love becomes a formative chaos; an intangible restlessness sting the heaving heart, the feelings resume their liberty without ethos, the delirious plastic fantasies float like islands floating in the middle of a sea, its fringes wet in foams of fancy.

Time: it ebbs, and it grows heals, bruises, infinite, untamed, claimed, unclaimed, fleeting, fleecing, away it goes... freeing small clods of feeling from the diaphanous chords of charted woes.

Nandita Samanta is a Indian poet, a short story writer, a reviewer, an artist. Many of her poems have been translated to different languages. She has two poetry books and about a dozen of short stories to her credit.

Omar Sabbagh Falling into Hope

On Fiona Sampson’s Come Down (Corsair, 2020)1

‘The contemporary reader needs, more than readers of previous generations, the general reassurance that poetry is susceptible of analysis. Without this, the confidence to take pleasure in any particular poem can be sapped, producing a generalized anxiety about possible failure of response and interpretation […] Demonstrating the power of analysis, as a general practice, is, therefore, not the enemy of a properly emotional response to poetry, but its necessary backdrop.’ Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination2 Come down where a bridge narrows the fast-moving river two movements contrary and conjoined ‘Come Down’

Fiona Sampson’s Come Down opens with a welcoming and an invitation. This is apparent in the grammar of the phrase that forms the title of the collection and the opening poem, as per above; but is also lived out in how the end of this invocation in that first line starts with a ‘bridge’ which ‘narrows.’ The bridge in fact speaks to the many ways in which this collection is more than the effect of one signal poetic sensibility, and more than the effecting

of poems that dovetail and hang-together in many synergetic ways, fording through and onto each other; the narrowing indicates the way in which this book, though composed of separate poems, is in effect one long poetic meditation. The deep community Sampson elicits between times and places, selves, selves and others, immanence, transcendence, sensations and sense-making, among many other poles of significance, bridges the manifold natures of ‘two movements’ by which contraries are conjoined. I want to begin to illustrate that for all the oneiric gusto of much of this work, Sampson’s cubism (at times), her multifarious folding of realities, is far from a record, however illuminating, of failure. The movements between times and places, selves and worlds, succeed in their mutual and reflexive illuminations on the whole, and the invocation to come down also ends up being successful: description and prescription, falling, fallenness and transcendence dance in a way which is to my mind a poetic tango evincing real hopefulness. Sampson is able to retrieve and re-collect in Come Down in a way that gives the intelligent reader a sense of the purpose of poetry. The collection has no punctuation, and the rigorous flowing of the lines throughout the collection are like stigmata of the interpenetration of the elements that go to make or configure self, selves, world, worlds; or, as Sampson titles the first, longer section of her biography of Mary Shelley, of the ‘instruments of life’. Breath seems key. Indeed, enjambments – which are the predominant mode of instrumentation in this collection – themselves conjoin perhaps two contrary formal senses. They might indicate the overflow of feeling or thought; but it’s also true to say, and this is a fertile boon of the poetic form, that their opposite, constraint, periodicity, could also indicate the same, inversely. In a way, Sampson’s thoroughgoing flow in this collection does both: indicates osmotic oneness and the contrarieties of the ambiguities of, and enacted by the same. In the way in which, consistently, it effects plosive meanings, making-senses well-nigh kaleidoscopic at times, the aesthetic chosen and deployed by Sampson, here as elsewhere, is neither periodic nor is it seamlessly fluid; it effects what Theodor Adorno

once called ‘continuous discontinuity’. This opening poem continues: where water rushes against stone that hands itself like a passing shadow over the bright surface of river racing away from the shock of self The verb chosen and deployed in ‘hands itself’, as throughout this collection typifies Sampson’s poetry more globally – both a salutary shock and a relief; both striking and bold as well as comforting. Hands of course are also proverbially busy with art-work. Then the ‘passing shadow’ goes over the ‘bright / surface’, ‘racing away / from the shock of self.’ The two contrary movements, ‘bright’ against ‘shadow’, compound, duplicitous, ambivalent but also polymorphous. The river of time races ‘away’ from the realisations of the self; and yet, it is the authorial self who is handcrafting these conflations. As later in the collection, the egoism of defense, the ego ‘organization’, is both eschewed and evinced, inside and outside the frame, like two more (meta-) movements: ‘through water cold enough / to drown you.’ Then, again, the ‘two movements crossing / over cannot / pass but they do…’ Failure somehow still succeeds, paradoxically, ‘as’, the poem ends: ‘sky steps / continually out / of the river.’ And it’s not just the paradox of contraries conjoined here, sky out of river, realisation, illumination, perhaps, out of the passing shadows of memory; and it’s not just the miming of the striking verb choice of ‘hands itself’ mirrored in the ‘steps’ of the ‘sky’; it’s also, most significantly perhaps, that the sky as it were solicited in and to ‘come down’, goes upwards, onwards. In many ways this eponymous poem does its eponymous business via two complementary movements, contraries conjoined; the discourse and its shaping, two, too.

‘a world turned upside down’ ‘Wharf’

‘between fir trees and roses where summer smells of something she already knows though she hasn’t yet caught it up’ ‘Frame’

An adopted child, Come Down is dedicated to Sampson’s ‘unknown family’. The integrity of Sampson’s poetic choices reaches back, as it were, to the dedication. For here are two movements, contrary and conjoined again. As two prominently-paired (but spaced apart in the collection’s sequencing) titles have it, the two movements in question being conjoined are like ‘Noumenon’ (‘unknown’) and ‘Phenomenon’ (within the horizon of the knower and the known). Indeed, the opening poem of the main, first partition of the collection, ‘Deaf’, like many if not the majority of the verse encapsulates, but in radically alternate concrete lyrics or narratives, the same desire at or for the unknown – becoming increasingly familiar, if perhaps never quite ‘caught up’ with. I will begin by demonstrating how this is the case. The poet opens with a deep ambivalence about egoism. Sampson is a highly self-aware poet. But self-awareness need not mean, by any means, egoistic tropes or gestures – quite the contrary of course. She is self-aware to the extent of critiquing her self-awareness and thus she is able to allow her selfhood to exist in or with, to partake of what Keats called ‘negative capability.’ Opening ‘Deaf’: Are you listening you are listening to the world you think but you hear yourself over and over the dark tongue of world…

Self slates it-self here as much as self also conjoins with world. The contrary senses, though conjoined, are not resolved. Sampson is

both listening to the world, which is a good thing in the value system of this work, as well as listening to the world she (merely) ‘thinks’, which might be viewed as a mode to be transcended. And then – in a different way of reading – even if she ‘thinks’ she’s ‘listening to the world’, she also realises in this second amphiboly that she only hears herself, ‘over and over.’ But whether that last option has negative connotations is not clear, because in this poem self becomes a part of world, no longer apart; which means what may seem a pejorative self-criticism is becoming something sublimated or indeed ‘sublated’ into its better half. In the next, second stanza we read of ‘darkness falling from your feet / so deep you could fall through it’, and the darkness of the poet’s ‘feet’ fall in a negative sense, ‘deaf’ to the world, but also ‘come down’ as it were, falling into the world, which is itself in a manner of speaking ‘deaf’. Deafness is both a problem and a solution, as contraries join hips. In the next, third, penultimate stanza, ‘night in the trees’ is ‘like a roost of parakeets’; and then, closing, ‘the dark tongue of world’ rises through the poet as she falls, ‘dear self dear / lonely self falling silently / mouthing through sound’. The going down, falling, is both falling into deafness, but also coming down to the truer (more risen) world she entices to come down. Even if the poet in the later ‘March Lapwings’ can say ‘…how lost / the senses are / in this disturbance’, there remains in ‘Deaf’ as in most of this opening part of the collection and beyond, a familiarity and intimacy with that nightly absence so often articulated, invoked, and enticed to come down. The roost of parakeets are colourful with sounds in all this darkness and silence; which is to say, faced as we will see more clearly presently with the now-beseeched noumenal, there is much hopefulness in attitude for what must remain to a certain extent beyond the ken of the poet’s awareness, ‘falling silently’ and yet ‘mouthing through sound.’ Self and the ultimate reaches of world, though in some deep signifying way necessarily unknown to each other, nonetheless turn and fold across each other, becoming familiar, more familiar. In the second poem, ‘Lady of the Sea’, again, the natural world seems to stand-in for the sublime reality of the noumenal realm, which is to say, that elicited in the verse is that which is somehow

both beyond but perhaps also regulative of the ego or imaginary issuing or at issue. Just as, later, in ‘The Nature of Gothic’ we read of how:

our desires make currents stir in tall air that asks us to see something perhaps the roof of the world

… but stone shifts endlessly into itself it disappears and reappears like hours that slip out of mind

So, equally, the first part of the four sections of ‘Lady of the Sea’ runs:

she is going already she is travelling past us and away ancient star flying so slowly we do not see her move

But there is more to this elusiveness than this. It is not just a regulative ideal that conditions one’s searching, groping towards it; it is also, like ‘sea’ or ‘night’ or later ‘snow’, a way of personifying or inhabiting in at-hand images the ultimate reaches of experience. The lady of the sea, still in this first section, ‘does not / regard us her / regard is drawn / back from us’; and paradox abounds as

ever. The sublime reality (embodied in this verse by nature’s mythoi at times) is of course beyond us, drawing us in as much as drawing us out, calling us out. And yet the drawing of our regard is not just a passive and subservient movement, as already suggested; the ambivalence of the verse’s shaping may suggest in ways already discerned, that when we are drawn by the ultimate reaches of the world (of experience), what draws us is also drawing-forth it-self. This duplicitous movement, between knowing and unknown, is relayed in the second part: could she move among us then or what

would be broken and fired again what understanding newly perfected Though ‘She’ is (part ‘iii’) ‘high and far / very high / and far like / the disappearing // note of wind’, yet (part ‘iv’):

we carry you in the eye’s reliquary like a mote or like a beam that drowning we could hang on –Lady stronger than time stronger than light we see you invisible and everywhere For all the progressive flow of this sequence, note how complementary or contrary images are conjoined. Wind and sea and sun-beam; the ‘ancient star’ and the ‘reliquary’ of the eye (‘I’), ‘a mote’; stronger than the light we fail to see by, ‘invisible’, yes, but

also ‘everywhere’. The many dual movements multiply and coalesce both within poems, as here, and across the collection, signifying a unitary and unitive poetic vision; and a way of accessing numinous experience in the immediate vicinity of versification.

Or, take the commissioned poem ‘Frankenstein’s Golem’, placed as it is before ‘Modern Prometheus’. The poet questions: ‘who is this… / in a landscape / not yet given / form by daylight’. The landscape, the natural world is not yet a ‘given’ for the ‘golem’ as well as not ‘given / form’. These two sliding senses differ as much as they coalesce inside and outside at least two frames – Sampson and her poem, and Frankenstein and his outlandish creation, who is yet to ‘con-form’. The fact that it is, as elsewhere, the nature of the gothic at issue, is clear when we read of how this ‘who’ in or at question ‘was lifted / not by love / by power alone’. Poor creature, as he is: forced to pass again through his own dying who slips away between rocks

The monster forced or enticed to come down into existence, to fall, is forced or enticed to fall again. The fall into the knowing or the known elides that latter as well. And yet in ‘Modern Prometheus’, following, this fallenness is seen in a more positive light, if redolent still with ostensible darkness – two (consecutive) contrary accounts conjoined. The ‘Modern Prometheus’ is: ‘a live thing / not yet separate from the dark / soothing his nakedness’. The dark doing the ‘soothing’ here (again a bold and yet comforting verb choice, typical of Sampson) is a lighter burden for one not yet separate from it; one that is to say, not quite fallen. However, the earlier wish for ‘companionship’, ‘someone to see yourself by’ is defied by the closing, of how ‘he recognises / the one he turns away from’. The dialectic of Nature, or as it stands in for noumenal reaches, revenges it-self against man for his very

unnatural and fallen endeavours and experiments with what remains at the last beyond and ‘unknown’ still. Whether it’s Frankenstein or his outlandish creation, ‘he listens without realising / hears rustling / doesn’t want to be alone / as night listens back.’ This of course recoups some of the duplicitous movements between subject and object worlds that were apparent in ‘Deaf’ and ‘Lady Of The Sea’. Here, this quid pro quo is again both a vengeance and a companionship, of the unknown upon the presumptuous knower or known, and of the unknown coming down to know the known and the knower. The untoward fallenness of attempts at familiarity, with the unknown, has its rewards as much as its punishments. The chiaroscuro, the moral occult of the gothic, seems to haunt as well as inhabit this work, close in time to Sampson’s major work of biography, In Search of Mary Shelley. Indeed, in ‘Noumenon’ the (re)sounding (syllabic) presence of the opening falling movement of ‘Snow falls and fills a valley’ ‘falls like something speaking / noiselessly into silence’. The noumenal is empathised with in parts of this poem, the unknown, it is intimated, invited to become familiar, however distant it may still remain. The noumenal (‘snow’ here) is ‘something that’s all alone / in silence can’t hear / itself.’ The dreamer in this poem who is both called to and calling of the snow coming down – the dreamer recognises in her own dream of snow coming down that ‘falling snow cannot feel / the world it longs to touch.’ The snow is like the ‘golem’, monstrous, sublime, and alone. And yet, the poet and/or dreamer is able to empathise and personify in a way that makes the resolute coming down welcomed, if not invited. in the dark the sleeper dreams snow is falling on her pillow as wide wet words the night speaks about itself snow speaking the words for night The contrariety of movements conjoined here are vertiginous. Among them: snow, white (light-giving) is part of the darkness; snow is dark with its own absence (night) as it is dreamed into the

presence here of ‘wide wet words’; and snow is light again as it speaks, a deployed image, for night. And so on, the poet seems to intimate. * Now to some more overtly intimate pieces. In ‘Mother as Eurydice’: ‘she was beautiful / in ways impossible / to understand’. This retraces in a more intimate way some of the ground already covered. But it is also interesting to discern perhaps (in a collection where Mary Shelley is redolent) an identification here with that same Mary Shelley, and the monstrosity, as it were, of having an absent mother, Mary Wollstonecraft. The impossibilities of grasping, then, are not just to do with metaphysical observations about the grounds of being and/or experience, and what P. F. Strawson calls in his work on Kant, ‘the bounds of sense’ – but also about the ground of one particular (part of) being or experience. Indeed, in the long sequential poem, ‘Boat Lane’, a poem dedicated ‘for my adoptive father’, a series of recollected scenes and gestures make up the long sequence, but the narrative design is not quite serial or chronological. Near the opening (and reprised close to the close) we read of how, ‘once again / and for the first time // I am following / my father.’ Like the contrariety in or of ‘Cold War: Afternoon’, where we see a similar metaphysical gesture of ‘once again / and long ago’ – temporal as much as spatial bearings are both condensed and displaced in this intimate and touching poem, ‘Boat Lane’. The ‘sea’ (again) the poet’s persona, following, is led down to ‘remembers how / all of this // belonged to it / once before’, as much as further along the poet knows ‘my grandparents // live here time / without end.’ Again, that is to say, the world’s most sublime natural reaches are mirrored and conjoined with far more intimate ones, whether in time or place. Thus, the poet follows ‘the lane / leading towards / them and away’ – contraries conjoined here across two short flowing lines. And much as the sea ‘murmurs loss’, earlier the ‘owls flutter / like rags trapped // above the tideline / calling me / out of sleep / wild child / wild child.’ The wilds and the wilderness of ‘out there’ are married onto the

self-awareness of the poet, unknown, wild, and yet still errantly familiar as such to herself. ‘[B]ut still the waves / lie and lie / the sea is never / satisfied’. That choice of line-ending is more than just a musical choice: ‘the sea is never’ means just that, as much as it overflows onto ‘satisfied’. Which is to say, as much as the poet calls down her adoptive father via the reaches of memory, the recollection is tarred with loss, the known somehow still unknown; or perhaps, better, the known returning to the unknown. The poem closes with the poet following again: I am following my father who belongs to marsh water and to the sea

Marsh water and the sea make here and there, the vast unknown and the more familiar vicinity, neighbours, as much as contraries conjoined. clamber out of yourself little bare creature from your sleeping self? ‘Surfacing’ These lines close the collection. Sampson surfaces at the end of Come Down, as she ‘climbs’ ‘out of the dream / as if from / a dark valley / into light / letting all that was / uncertain come / clear…’. Much like the structure of her previous collection, The Catch, which was also split between two parts, the first longer than the second – the second, shorter section of this collection at hand is titled, eponymously, ‘Come Down’, and is comprised of a long versatile poem, dedicated however to Sampson’s ‘immigrant ancestors’. Indeed, as we open this poem, invited to: ‘Come down where it / narrows down / over the last field / where the valley squeezes / almost shut’, this conclusive, or closing, movement also, in the

next stanza, ‘opens’, as we are, equally, invited to ‘come down / into light and dark / systole and diastole’. As at the start (whose title was a mirror), these are two movements, contrary and conjoined. It’s startling and remarkable how all this unificatory visioning across the collection can still remain radically concrete through each page. One of the most salient accomplishments of this collection, where Sampson seems to be ‘coming into her own’ and in more than one sense (towards her ‘unknown family’, her ‘immigrant ancestors’), is precisely the way it can be seen to be one long poetic meditation in search of her selves as they come down, into a matrix, earthed by now more exponential insight. Sampson in search of herself, she reads ‘traces of the ones who left / just this morning / centuries ago’. She is falling in this section into the knowledge of a truer more berthed selfhood, and the movement redounds with hope, grace, rather than the other, more staple mythos of ‘falling’ or ‘fallenness’: in one stone where the red stain spreads like something entering a wound to turn the blood that gallops into your ears Yes, there is the wound, but the wound seems also to redress itself. Even if the addressees of this powerful poem ‘stand just / out of frame’, they’ve ‘always / known the light lying // along the top field / and the pear tree’s / hieroglyph’. While Sampson travels, out there and in here, ‘amid the ragged light / and bird-screams / of memory before / words’, she sees ‘the fast distant ship’ which ‘dreams of a child / who floats her face pale / her hair spread and tangled / like the dream’. There is a constant movement between knowing and unknowing, dream and waking that makes the poem as visceral as it is magical at times. This is so because the girl detailed in this poem conflates with Sampson herself, the past, unknown, distant, coming down to meet the poet, like her destiny, like the fiat of the gods, for ‘she is you’. As ‘time folds / into another century / where you come walking / down with them //

into the future / they won’t arrive at’, and while ‘three lost children’ take ‘the measure / of their strangeness’ – the acts of counterfactual re-collection, retrieval, in this poem are filled with light, hope: ‘heat and juice / in the smile / of a stranger / who will never / speak your name’. ‘[S]mells as old / as another country / this too is belonging’, as, closing the poem, ‘narrowing’ now: breathing seems to fill the leaves and look the old ones keep passing through us saying world is wide we must come down together into its valley The mutual, reflexive play between the inanimate and the animate, now inter-animated, is like an image deployed for the relationships between pasts and presents and futures, which keep on passing as well as keep on being passages, breathing as much as narrowing, systole and diastole. And it’s poignant that that last invocation to ‘come down’ is no longer as riven by self-searching and self-questioning, but is a resolute invitation to come down ‘together’. Ending this poem, a poem both magical and real, this trope of community – so persistent in Sampson’s oeuvre – speaks not only between Sampson and her ancestors, Sampson and the different movements of her selves, but of course is also a welcoming gesture at her readers, who will have felt their way through the perambulations and permutations of what is one sustained poetic searching, made up of many contrary but conjoined movements. As per the epigraph of this concluding section, both Sampson and we, her readers, ‘surface’ at the last, going upwards like skies stepping out of the rivers of time. We are enjoined to clamber out by what has, or will have, come down to us.

Indeed, towards the end of ‘Come Down’, and towards the end of the book, Come Down – before the surfacing, that is to say – we read of ‘night’ again being (dialectically) illuminated:

and all night long digs in sand believing she can reach Australia down and down she digs and suddenly here is wide scrubland red rock the colour of home This searching-out of the ‘red rock’ of ‘Australia’, the outback from which Sampson’s ancestors emigrated, ends up being both earth but also: an earthing. Sampson – going down and down here, into the good earth – is also going and coming; coming down into hope.

1 This is an adapted excerpt from Chapter Two of Omar Sabbagh, Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Anthem Press, July 2020).

2 Stefan Collini, The Nostalgic Imagination: History in English Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 110.

Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and Critic. This article is excerpted from his Reading Fiona Sampson: A Study of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics (Anthem Press, 2020). He teaches at the American University in Dubai (AUD), where he is Associate Professor of English.

Francisco Munoz Soler

What is it to be a poet and why

What is it to be a poet and why, I never ask these questions to myself, it flows out from the spring within my soul forging the choices of my life, my stance in the world, expressing myself through the word and through silence with beauty and humanism.

There are tombs that in their silence

There are tombs that in their silence speak of the world, they keep a joyful harmony and emit a music that go beyond walls, barber wires and shackles, that keep alive youthful dreams where love heals wounds with stability and solace, there are tombs that rise above cruelty and infamy, their river of bliss purifies acid rains.

We should be afraid

We should be afraid of the fears that control and divide us,

that paralyze the energy to combat the greed of the elite,

of cynicism which disguises their prevalent opulence as a sign of security. We should be afraid of not daring ourselves to desire a worthy life.

Hatred seduces

Let's not deceive ourselves: hatred seduces. All one needs to do is look at history, no remind us of the splendour of its arsons. The elegant executioners take no rest, they stalk their wretched victims, they discriminate, dehumanize, execute, always firm, neat, credible, they sweep away hordes with symbols and have legions to defend themselves. Let's not deceive ourselves: hatred is lovely. Truth and coexistence demand that brotherhood and compassion should not remain in eloquent silence and hatred should not rewrite history.

Francisco Munoz Soler is a Spanish poet has been published extensively in countries like Spain, Mexico, United States, India, Peru, El Salvador and Venezuela. He is the organizer of the Plenilunio Poetic Cycle of Malaga.

Mrinal Basu Chaudhuri

An ordinary repose

Those dream-balloons, not having touched the sky,ever, are my playmates everyday. I am friends with the river on whose emptied banks I sit and touch the lonely shadow. The temple which sees no worship, I bow my head fearfully to the dark idol there. The lady whose feet lack a sprint, with eyes not buzzing like a bee, I go with her, beyond the fields, to the fair-grounds of “Charaka”, The young man who keeps walking towards the moon, but returns empty-handed at the dusk, I give him a plain shirt and a towel and teach him ways to an ordinary repose. The ways to emancipation, transcendence, may well be researched upon, it is only a man who can stand by another.

Translated by Amanita Sen

Freedom

the intimidating noise of the boots the blood stained menaces the proud bullets ignoring them all the love that help us to revolt stay courageous is freedom the healing touch that help us forget the monstrous tyranny teach us altruism

walking together side by side I call it freedom amidst the smell of the verdant earth nature under the moonlit sky when people sleep peacefully I know freedom is in the air the parade of artistic dreams invading the thoughts the delight of the gallant river the sublime voice of an unearthly woman wordlessly tells me how much of the self-sacrificial sacred blood have steeped in our freedom history language and the enchanting grassy bed

Translated by Amanita Sen

Mrinal Basu Chaudhuri is a renowned poet from Kolkata India. He started his poetic journey in 1965 with his book 'Magno Belabhumi'. His total published books on poetry 32, others 6. He has received several awards including Paschimbongo Bangla Akademi.

Ashraf Aboul-Yazid

Maps of the mirage:

A map of a spotlight

The only spotlight is seeking for two eyes, hurt by darkness. It is seeking for eyeballs engraved by the darkness to read one thousand and one texts. It is seeking for a knife to kill the night with. It is seeking for a star, to get it melted, in a deserted glass. It is seeking for a map of love.

A map of the river

My river is thirst for waterfall, It is crawling searching for its tributary, It is searching for a valley to cross, Expressing love and temptation. The river is searching for you, To dive into his mouth.

A map of the city he left

The boy will return looking for the house of his neighboring girl. But he will only see the dry roses in her balcony. He will knock at the door, with no answer but of the sleeping bat that tells him of the heresy of death. Despite of the shades

thrown by the concrete forests, he shall search roads around the house. The signs of love, they once engraved in tree trunks, might be still there. Despair shall sleep in his eyes on the abandoned thresholds, as he was looking for the gates leading him out of this labyrinth. But he forgets the password of survival, and becomes a statue in a legend.

A map of a garden at the edge of death

The only ways leading to you are wet by the tongue of a mirage. The green color in your fields is a mixture of algae and waste land. Your illusionary garden is only living in your head, lying in the intestines of the jungle. If you stretch your hands to hold its roses of fire, it will take you into its mouth. And inside the belly of the dragon; you shall be a pile of dust.

A map for google’s sons

You are just a few points and lines. You are colors left in some corners and circles. Nothing could identify you; no heart pulses, no breast Breathes, and no words. You are the sons of a research engine, You are numbers and letters typed on the maps of «Google.»

A map of an old sorrow

It is snaking in your ribs, searching for a hole in the apple of your heart, searching for a deserted road, that leads towards memories. It is inspecting your secret drawers; There might be something you erased. It will feed it with fire, and sing for orgasm, on its way back.

A map of a house over there

There is a house where I live Over there, it sniffles like the mills of Don Quixote. From far away It looks like a gravestone. If you are approaching there, you shall see me crucified on its balcony, watching the flocks of seagulls, as I touch my lifeless wings.

Protiti Rasnaha Kamal

A lover's goodbye

Countless minds rushing to work, yours is only one of them, you follow your own path, while my tears fog your windshield, you don't wipe it clean, you dont see through the haze. Waiting on you, I gasp in fear of losing our time in an hourglass, creating a sand dune, the chaos in my mind says our time's at ease, but we are restless still.

As the sand pours you take off to your own crowd, your everyday need to create a miracle without me by you, to create an eye for a thorough read. Sometimes you skim a magazine of the richest 30, sometimes you settle on a philosopher's dream, of figuring out the rational, the quantities the exact nature of love, its greed. I write for you, I philosophize with my words, my own thoughts on love but your thoughts are certain, they are a mind's trail toward an attempt at climbing high. My eyes travel too, you should know my feet fly too, as I dream. The fog, my breath wipes it clean. Now we see each other, as a goodbye coats the screen.

Artist's trace

A trial today, a wonder tomorrow the magic lies in the artist's plan. He sketches first, his childhood toy. A fluffy etch, spat from a paint brush's end, a bow or a tie, a misfit on the neck the toy soothes the pencil's ache. Then he turns the page, a growing tree, tall and sharp, with a pen's stroke it smiles a drape of lines around the trunk, some flowers hug the roots, through the designer's eye. A couple of pages later, a face looks on, through its haggard edges. The weary eyes bleed through the page, while the smile is lost by an eraser's mess. And then we find an end to an artist's mind, his portfolio emerges, its hurried pace draws sketches without life, from life's own sketch his tomorrow held tight, by his early days. His vision has painted a picture of his eye, whose dreams are found in walls, exhibits a flock of questions, an image to decipher some value found in an artist's trace.

Protiti Rasnaha Kamal's writings have been published in newspapers such as The Daily Star, Daily Observer, Dhaka Tribune and The Bombay Review. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, USA.

Kiran Bhat

Sudeep Sen’s ‘Anthropocene’

The Anthropocene: the cycle of time during which human existence has threatened the ecosystem of the earth. While humans have been causing ecological devastation since we wrung ourselves out of the embryos of evolution and began to think for ourselves, there is a new range of art confronting the impact of recent trangressions and their aftermaths on our shared home. Namely, there is the matter of climate change, and the ways that many species of life will cease to exist at the end of this fragile slipshod of a century. But, as the poems in Sudeep Sen’s latest collections of poems reveal, the Anthropocene is not merely an ecological context. It describes a range of human responses to this feeling of an end, or this feeling of an epoch transitioning into something much worse.

Anthropocene: Climate Change, Contagion, Consolation -- the poetry collection is divided into eight segments. The prologue essay, “The Role of the Artist is Not to Look Away” reacts on the fate of island nation Kiribati and the ecological devastation occurring in India through the prisms and poetics of Sen’s reflections. The sections which come after are “Anthropocene,” “Pandemic,” “Contagion,” “Atmosphere,” “Holocene,” “Consolation,” and “Epilogue.” While these subtitles give a large enough sense as to what sort of themes and topics the coming poems plan to address, often the subject matters and emotions evoked through the poems

transverse, collide, and intersect. Still, the poems in the collection can largely be classified as reactions to either climate change or the coronavirus pandemic, with a thorough aside of poems that traverse geography, locale, and nature. The strongest poetry of the collection belong to the second caption, “Anthropocene: Climate Change.” Perhaps because climate change is truly the greatest existential threat humanity will have to face in this century, Sen emits far more passion and anguish than he does in any of the other sections of the collection. This genuine desire to spark change or educate readers combined with Sen’s gift of words creates magnificent results. The first poem of the collection, “i.e. [That Is],” as simple and short as it is, creates astonishing levels of subversion. Sen begins the poem on an evocation. He asks the reader to hear “the sound of a lone rustling leaf.” Of course when we think of such a sound, we most likely imagine a leaf from some sort of tree, and the sounds of it shaking against the wind. But, then, Sen says immediately after, “you hear the sea.” We are immediately transported to another place and context that normally would not come to us. Sen plays with our mind again. He says, because I consider the sea silent — you hear its silence in my studio, transporting us once more to a place that we normally do not connect to water. And yet, because of this displacement, we are damned to loneliness, and emptiness. We are lost without the company of others, and so Sen returns to the place of the first image.

because of that — the silence will not empty the sea of its leaves. From teleportation to fixation, Sen takes the reader to pollution-inundated Delhi in the poem, “Disembodied.” Sen

merges the very bones and muscles of his body with the minarets and fortress walls of his city. He claims his flesh to be “sculpted from fruits of the tropics,” just as he draws his blood “from coconut water” and imagines skin“coloured by brown bark of Indian teak.” However, because Sen is built as well from the “searing ultra-violet light from Aurora Borealis patches,” he cannot fully fit in the circumference of India. He is one atom in the great dissemination of the universe, “where radiation germinates from human follies,” or “where contamination persists from mistrust.” Sen breaks stanza and moves onto the melting of the glacial caps. He worries about the lack of water, or the flooding that will cause countless to drown.

“Disembodied floats, afloat like Noahs Ark.” Of the coronavirus poems collected under the compilation “Pandemic: Love in the Time of Corona,” “Speaking in Silence” drew the most intrigue, largely for its exceptional use of alliteration. Sen combines a frustration at the lack of government action towards the coronavirus pandemic with a staggering use of wordplay. In sentences like, “As the world pandemically wrestles with dry heat of disease and pestilence — profiteers pry, pilfer[,]” Sen makes not only a very important political point about corporate greed and human suffering. His compilation of ‘p’ sounds further at atmosphere of somberness and a paranoia of decay. The words ‘pry’ and ‘pilfer’ click off of the tongue, and they create a sense of disgust at the lack of action around us immediately after. Likewise, in the lines, “social distancein solitary silos — mutating metaphors spilling everywhere, defying state and statelessness[,]” the use of ’s’ words create sense of strandedness as well as helplessness. We are collecting as one, but we are equally damned to those who govern us, yet choose to not help their citizens. The poems from section number five of the collection, “Atmosphere: Skylines,” depict Sen’s mastery of couplet. Over the

course of a few weeks, Sen played around on his terrace and captured the sunset on his camera, attempting to evoke his reaction to the changing of the hours with some short lines of poetry. It is not necessary to stare at the same image Sen has taken to be evoked by his words. Under the dazzles of a departing sun, Sen notices

‘the rays glare / splits open their perfect coronas — pollen shower-burst, an ochre-flare,’ giving the sensibility of not only a sunset, but of particles thrashing against the earth, milliseconds of matter parting to compound and erupt at the throw of his thoughts. Conversely, underneath a flock of concavely blue clouds, Sen writes, ‘blue-grey will moult into salt-and-pepper ash-grey to silver-white, then to aged-white.’ To call “salt-and-pepper” a color creates the sense of spices dashing into the air, and then as we reflect on “aged-white,” we assume a milder image, something almost like fermenting cheese. Sen aligns the flavors of food with the sights of nature, and causes us as a result to view images in a completely new way. There are the poems of travel, subtitled under “Holocene: Geographies,” and then the ultimate compilation of reprieve and redemption, “Consolation: Hope.” After cycling through the world, not only through the places that have impacted Sen, but the atmospheric conflicts and confrontations that have riddled his mind with concern, Sen concludes his tour on a poem reflecting on the death of George Floyd. At first, the poem “Knee Jerk” seems a little out of line with the rest of the collection, but offers a weight and gravitas of its own little world. Sen decries, “Your bigoted white knees may have the blunt shameless strength to wrestle me down — but not the gift of humanity, or an ounce of compassion to make life breathe again.”

And so comes this almost effortless conjoining of an undeserved death, the emotions that it arouses, and then this inability to breathe - a collective problem thanks to COVID and to air pollution, a problem faced by a certain minority group due to widespread racism and systemic oppression. Almost each and every stanza of the poem plays with this amalgamation, such as when Sen quotes the lines of President Donald Trump and police officers saying, “‘use more domination, force[,]’ only to remark immediately after, “How long can he breathe toxic air in his dungeon?” The image returns us to a pollution ridden Delhi, reminding us that no matter how geographically far persecution appears, humans are suffering in another way, on another bedazzled and perturbed corner of this world. Ultimately, to truly cover a collection as vast as this one, each and every poem would have to be covered as if they were their own singular collection. That is the amount of thought and time Sudeep Sen has spent in writing each and every one of them. Sen has approached each poem as its own novel, making sure that the structure, wordplay, and intent are aligned to create as much reaction in a reader as possible. Taken one at a time, each poem inspires, devastates, and rewards. But then there are the collective ways that each of the poems speak out to each other, both in their subtitled compilations, but also in how the chapters merge together to form one singular result. It is as if each poem is like an individual on this earth. Much like you or I, there is much to appreciate when we read a person for they are. But, equally like you or I, there is much more to be gained, when we choose to be read in conversation with each other, or in dialogue.

Kiran Bhat has travelled to 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. He is the author of we of the forsaken world... (Iguana Books, 2020), and has authored books in four foreign languages. His writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, The Colorado Review, Eclectica, 3AM Magazine, The Radical Art Review, The Chakkar, Mascara Literary Review, and others. He currently lives in Melbourne.

Aminur Rahman

The road stretches up to the skies

I have been walking along the way since morning. There is no end to the path And I give up both bathing and eating. The whole family walks with me Carrying the necessities of our household life, Looking forward to a safe shelter. But there is no end to this path; The road stretches up to the sky, And as we walk, the road stretches even further. Our house is located a little way from the Police Line of Rajarbag. Yesterday I saw Rajarbag ablaze with fire. The Police Line is horrified by the fire. I cannot see much of it, but I can smell that something terrible has happened. Although our family is not a large one, Our closest relatives are huddled together in our house And everyone is apprehensive that war has started. Papa is listening to BBC Radio, pressing his radio to his ears, While others sit around him trying to hear the news. We had to leave our house early in the morning; We live in the neighbourhood of the Police Line So the Pak Army could kill us any time. All night long our anxiety grew. Mum and our aunties got busy Packing all the necessary household articles for the whole family. Papa got angry because the baggage was so heavy. We were waiting for the sun to rise, Or should I say, we were waiting for the light, Waiting so that we could start our walk. We all walk past marshes and bushes, past trees and grasses, The children sitting on the shoulders or in the arms of adults. The emotions of our surroundings are very different From what is in our hearts, where innocence has become A time of self-awakening. Suddenly a jeep from the Pak Army stops before us. Papa and our uncles are working with the government.

They show their ID cards, saving themselves from trouble. When we were leaving our house, I saw them hide these ID cards with care, A safeguard for us all. We continue walking, mile after mile; We could never imagine walking on like this, On and on as if we were in a dream. We are like travelers who have lost their home, Who have become strangers in their own land. A bullet passes just inches away from us. Throughout the country, the Bengalis put up resistance In a sporadic manner. The Liberation Army rises up in every village. We meet them on our way. What robust and thunderous slogans Are there on every lip. I do not know how the people In the villages and towns have become so courageous. This is a different kind of inspiration, For everyone is engrossed in the desire to win the fight. All our family keeps on walking, Sometimes spending the night in the house of unknown people, Then walking, walking, always walking In the ardent desire to reach a safe place. There is so much warmth even in the cottage of the poorest farmer. We live like this, searching for direction On the road we walk down, From path to path, From day to day, From night to night. Sometimes we walk for our homeland, Sometimes for peace; Sometimes we walk for freedom, Sometimes for a piece of land. We walk and walk Along the ceaseless, boundless path, A path that will never end. We continue walking, and walking… Translated by Nandita Bhattacharya

The dimensions of a poem

As I search in the dark I have finally caught hold of my poem. I am not ashamed to say that I have been looking for a month at least before it came into my grasp. This poem in my hand Has the dimensions of my loosely wrapped fingers and I can feel within it’s cool touch. I have always seen a poem dancing with the wind, spreading fragrance all around. I have seen my poem melting as moonlight on the body of the leaves And how I have never been able to grasp them in my fingers. A poem has been around me like the tinkling sound of anklets. As I hear to the resonance of the music I am looking for it in the music of this song I have searched all around alas! could never find one. In the middle of the night having suddenly woken up Hearing cries I went anxiously looking for my poem. All I found was a salty water drenched pillow but not a single trace of any poem. Now finally after many days I have got a poem in my grasp. And I wonder how long I can hold this poem in my closed palms? As I opened my palms to gaze at them But where? Where is the poem? All I found is the fossil of love in the hungry shape of my hand.

Translated by Nandita Bhattacharya

Aminur Rahman is an internationally acclaimed poet from Bangladesh. He is a renowned Translator, Editor and Critic. Published more than 40 books in the country and abroad.

Claire Booker

It’s never too late for a happy childhood

There’s no wrong kind of snow. Scoop a handful. Squeeze. Throw it at a wall. Keep throwing until the wall vanishes. Snow has an open mind. Fall backwards into virginity and flap your wings. Leave a footprint. Spot woodpecker tracks. Be awed by the exuberance of dog pee. Remember – a snowman is not just for Christmas. It will outlast drifts, but never your affection. Remove your gloves. Your hands will become icy. This is empathy. Do not attempt legs or genitalia. A snowman is beyond gender. The head will fall off. Several times. It has hurtled to earth from 5,000 feet. Its coal eyes were once diamonds. Or will be. Your snowman is 98% water. You are 80% water. You have already met in a stream.

Turning back

I find myself entangled in red – crumpled bloody handkerchiefs of maple or maybe dogwood? It’s a kind of folly, this letting go. Or a foretelling. Light filters the understorey’s carousel of aimless forms that crash against walls of eternal holly. I hold out my hands, but none drop onto my supplicant palms –

only the sound of acorns pelting the ground. Corrugated clay, thick as a kiss, has moated the path. There’s a gate ahead, half open, the way reckless in snaking ivy. I hesitate. The gate’s half shut against me, and my feet are bruised. The Bone that Sang

After the Grimm’s fairy tale

A herdsman, driving his beasts through the torn mesh of forest, stumbles on a thread of human vertebrae, crafts its frail ivory into a mouthpiece, and a note comes fluting from his lips – its pitch at first inaudible as the cries of pipistrelles.

In his palace, the generalissimo hoists the ripe meat of genocide onto his shoulders – builds a cage out of the contortions of his own mouth, where he constructs truths that walk and talk like real children.

Ravines clot with secrets. Whispers float like thistle seed to all corners of the kingdom. He plucks each chalk-white petal of paperwork before he signs: she loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, she loves me not.

Under this vaporizing sun, people suck on pebbles to assuage their thirst. Men are turned to firewood, children drop like leaves. But still he knows, how the vanished can fruit death caps from any scrape of earth. That bones sing when they find a ready ear.

Santosh Kumar Pokharel

Hoots hunger

My hunger hoots in the noon and midnight In the lonesome spots Where bytes have been lied Many a time my hunger has survived In this time belly mine often fights. Tremors feel do my limbs undergo This has been for long time ago This could not your words subside My belly’s still void.

Lo nothing will I lose nothing gain Why shall then loyal to I remain? Let me shout for the naught this I know Every bout that about fruitless go But my hope does gallop for my right I do hoot in the noon and midnight. Nov 28.2020. Bhaktapur Nepal

Speak love to be

I am aware, aware indeed Let the rites of others and creed To florish but the seed innate To be sown everywhere I won't let Peace be my religion let me peace get. My religion is but a humble smile My religion is nature not it defile I wish to leap dance and enthrall In gaiety, so let live peoples all! Let live people all. I want to win your heart and concealed Your love, and love -whirls that are spilled

Hold me tight in your arms around And keep my words all the way spellbound. What more a man may need to be? Speak love to be, speak love to be! October 21. 2020.

Santosh Kumar Pokharel is a senior Civil Engineer and a noted multilingual Poet and Translator from Nepal. He spent almost seven years in in Moscow during his study. Mr. Pokharel is a published poet and has hundreds of poems and four published books,

Anna Keiko

The dawn of hope Everything is going down

Winter is coming and everything is falling Only the night is getting fuller and fuller The pupils of the luminous sky are clear They are apparently unharmed by fear But humans are knocked back to their origin by the virus Which looks for any weak body it can attack Furious lips and teeth add to the confusion Desire bends the path of light The image of a world wrapped in roses Covers its vast ugliness of reality, A deception called prosperity.

Walking in the Bucharest park

The moon stood high in the sky Undulating the waves of the lake Full of mystery the bushes, the fire in my heart Suddenly a dark cloud covered the path and although it was June, summer, a cold wind blew through my dress A storm and heavy rain poured down No place to hide, at loss and disoriented in the dark forest all alone, I had to find the way out.

An empty glass

Water, a part of my body I tried to drink it But when I tried to drink it The glass was empty Where did the water go

In no time? Is the existence No more than a glass of water? It's a mystery, it's confusion What happened? Yesterday, I was here at the same time And filled the glass Would the water not have disappeared if I had remained here? Was my mind trapped in the glass Or?

Waiting for the bus

I'm waiting for the bus Many busses pass by the station They go to different places But there is no bus to take me where I want to go I am still waiting, from winter to spring Nobody cares about the people waiting for the bus They walk, or they run I wait from dark till dawn Trees hibernate and wake up, So also do the birds Did humans change in thousands of years? Only a few stars have awoke I don't know the distance to the place I want to go I keep waiting for the bus.

Down of hope

The light of dawn erases the traces of the night. Relentlessly, time goes on flowing, although I wish it would stop like a picture fixed by the camera’s lens because as valuable like fruit in a tree is love.

Like the moon ascending at night, so you are, my love. Whatever happens, wherever you are, I keep you in my heart. Since I am in love with you, my world has changed for two hearts found a home of tenderness.

Sunrays play on the strings of love lighting up the dawn of hope.

In the heart

I can’t see you But you affect me everywhere At dawn, at twilight and at night You are the light My eyes can’t refuse to see You are everywhere Whether I can see you or not You are the unpublished poem I wrote in my heart.

If I were a star

If I were a star I would wait for you at your window at night If I were a cloud in summer I would soften the warmth of sun above you. If I were the wind, I would gently blow your face when you sweat. If I were a bird I would sing for you by day and by night But I am but an ant longing to fly like an eagle seeing you from the sky and settle close to you If I were a star...

Love

If you are the boat I wish to be water If you are water I wish to be the shore If you are the shore I wish to be the bridge If you are a bridge I’ll wait for you on the other side Forever...

The other half of my love

In your brightness, I learn how to love In your wisdom, I learn how to write poems You’ve been perching on my left breast In my right eye And with my luggage and the daily food along the way Open both of your arms, my love Take your fortune in firm grasp Say, if the Goddess of the Parthenon has taken my eyes Then you must have stolen my heart Under the transparent sky People are made to suffer The world where you would roam freely Is but a coastline without limits

So, my other half This is the truth if you want to hear To love is to obey To the nothingness that is placed in authority over us. Translated by Anna Keiko and Germain Droogenbroodt

Anna Keiko (China) is member of Shanghai Pudong Writers Association, Founder and Chief Editor of Shanghai Huifeng Literature and Chinese director of the ITHACA cultural foundation. She was invited at several poetry festivals and published in 20 languages.

Manuel Iris Triptych of glimpses

I Poetry as an intimate matter

Only by stripping naked one can enter the poem. Reading poetry is — there is no other option — an encounter between two honesties. Each reader and each poem always intertwine in intimacy: they inhabit poetry, and each other. Poetry reading is a non-transferable, essentially subjective experience that defines the poem as much as it defines the reader. That is why I think it is necessary to defend the practice of naked reading. Naked reading is getting to the poem, leaving aside (during reading) the name of the publisher, and the poet's awards, prestige, and fame. Naked reading is meeting the book or the poem with complete humility, with authentic curiosity while asking the same from the poem, because a naked reader asks for nudity, and a naked poem does not accept anything else in return. One approaches the poem with complete vulnerability, asking for the same in return, as in the act of love: it is focusing on the poem, only. Naked reading is done with honesty, with both feet planted on what is wanted and what is needed, on what is said and what is confessed, on what is kept silent, and what is hidden. For those who practice naked reading, a poet will be valued after reading his books, and not after reciting his awards. The introduction to a poet is his poems, not his biography. The reader seeking nudity reads poem by poem, and not author by author.

The reader has the right to disagree with any academic opinion, if he has truly read and feels that his sensitivity asks for something else: he may have a different need, and there is always a poet, a poem, which may be his, and it may well be a poet from the golden age, from another language, a local poet from his state, or a stranger. It could also be the poet everyone talks about, the award-winning poet. The important thing is that this approach must be made from honesty. Also, the poet should follow himself and not be guided by what the awards and scholarships, the press releases, the poisonous “best” lists, the hallway comments say: he may also have a different need and, if he does not follow it, he will never find his voice. Of course, we must read our contemporaries and pay attention to the opinion of those who dedicate themselves to reading, but none of their judgments should dictate our own: we must defend our emotionality, but also – for it to be healthy and refined – we must feed it with the other, the different. The naked reading makes it clear: it is a lie that there is such a thing as “the best poet” of a generation, country, or time. Poets cannot be objectively compared. There is, yes, the poet with whom I communicate. The poet who tells us things, the one who seems not only to be talking about us o but from us. There is the poem that, at a certain moment, corresponds to us. And we are free to look for it wherever we want, or wherever or intuition sends us. The only condition for making poetry is a total surrender to it: that’s how the poet gets to be free. There is no way out: the poetic experience will be naked, or it will not be.

II Poetry and reality

Although it does it, the poem does not seek to reflect or express what is happening in the world. Its real impulse is to respond. The poem is a response to the society of its time and is therefore a stance, a reaction. Not a mirror, but a video projector over the well-known, everyday streets, is the poem.

Contrary to what has been said, today’s poetry does not face uncertainty, but rather explores it, and proposes ways of approaching it, of making it speech, of saying it. The poet is a formulator, a human lost like the others, although with the ability to articulate not only his certainties but the doubts of all his brothers and sisters: he is not the guide of the tribe but the spokesman of the common orphanhood. The poem is not only a chain of words, emotions, an idea that explodes, or a stridency that seeks to be heard. The poetic response is a possibility of the mind, a different way of inhabiting reality. Faced with the noise of the immediate, current poetry proposes (or at least some current poetry that interests me) slowness and calm, quiet, recollection. Once the religious faith has been lost — if it has been lost — poetry is a dialogue with transcendence, a re-connection with the cosmos. In the age of automatic information, of live broadcasts of all events at all hours, the reading of poetry is a space for calm, for slowness. Poetry, all poetry, indicates at the same time what we are as individuals, and as a tribe. Seeing ourselves like this, intimately twinned, makes us slow down the speed or our interactions, the rapidness of separating individualities. Poetry reveals our true face behind the mask of the immediate. Even the most explosive poems seek to eternalize a moment to see it happening perpetually in the reading. A poem is always read for the first time; it is always starting over. The words of the poem are born from and go towards silence, which is not their annulment but the land in which they are sown and in which their meaning arises. Precisely now, in these times of immediacy, of accelerated communication, poetry gives us the possibility of seeing each other and ourselves: it unites us. Such is its function in the face of reality.

III Poetry and transcendence

(Silence, transparency, slowness)

The poem is a form of silence. Even speaking of noise or violence, the poem creates silence. Poetry is a mode of contemplation and it is also (like contemplation) a way of accessing the interior of things and oneself when observing them: to leave oneself by entering oneself, that is the reading of the poem. Stopping, decanting, receiving: the poet is a creator of slowness, a facilitator of pause. His job is to show what's behind things, once reality sets in. The poet’s job is learning to disappear, to become transparent: to make room in his resonance box so that the mystery can vibrate within it. Approaching the poem leaves no choice but to start exploring our interior oratories, our galleries of dust, our intimate tombs. The voice becomes a bridge between the flesh and the light. That is why it is necessary, in the face of reality, the slowness of the poem: it is necessary to structure the silence, to articulate the calm. Born from the present times and their concerns, poetry conquers time. It is not present, past, or future: it is permanence. Every poem already existed and needs to be invented. Every poet and every reader seeks the verbal revelation of a time before and after his.

Whatever its theme, contemporary or not, poetry is necessary because of the gifts that link it to prayer: silence, transparency, slowness. Word by word, the poet and the reader open the door of their flesh to enter a place that, perhaps, they have inhabited before.

The silence of the poem is the echo of a previous silence to which we seek to return. Its slowness is the pulse of another life. Its transparency allows us to see each other.

Manuel Iris is a Mexican poet living in the United States. He received the “Merida” National award of poetry (Mexico, 2009) for his book Notebook of dreams, and the Rodulfo Figueroa Regional award of poetry for his book The disguises of fire (Mexico, 2014). In 2018 Manuel was named Poet Laureate of the City of Cincinnati, Ohio. Manuel Iris holds a PhD in Romance Languages from the University of Cincinnati.

Korean Literature by Edition Delta

에디치온 델타 한국문학 시리즈

황동규 Hwang Tong-Gyu 버클리풍의 사랑 노래 - Berkeley’sches Liebeslied Gedichte, zweisprachig: Koreanisch – Deutsch. Übersetzt von Kim Kyung-Hee und Bettina Opitz-Chen. ISBN 978-3-927648-73-9

김양식 Kim Yang-Shik 순간 순간이 - Jeder Augenblick Gedichte, zweisprachig: Koreanisch – Deutsch. Übersetzt und mit einem Nachwort von Sophia Tjonghi Seo. ISBN 978-3-927648-71-5

김재혁 Kim Jae-Hyeok 딴생각 - Gedankenspiele Gedichte, zweisprachig: Koreanisch – Deutsch. Übersetzt von Kim Jae-Hyeok und Tobias Lehmann. ISBN 978-3-927648-55-5

김선우 Kim Sun-Woo 도Ȭ 아래 잠들다 - Unter Pfirsichblüten eingeschlafen Gedichte, zweisprachig: Koreanisch – Deutsch. Übersetzt von Kang Seung-Hee und Kai Rohs. ISBN 978-3-927648-23-4

신달자 Shin Dal Ja Morgendämmerung Werkauswahl 1989-2007 Gedichte: Koreanisch (tw.) – Deutsch. Übersetzt und mit einem Nachwort von Sophia Tjonghi Seo. ISBN 978-3-927648-42-5

박희진 Park Hijin Himmelsnetz Werkauswahl 1960-2003 Gedichte: Koreanisch (tw.) – Deutsch. Übersetzt und mit einem Nachwort von Doo-Hwan und Regine Choi. ISBN 978-3-927648-21-0

퇴계 Toegye (Lee Hwang/ Yi Hwang) Als der Hahn im Dorf am Fluss krähte, hing der Mond noch im Dachgesims Gedichte 1515-1570. Deutsche Fassungen von Tobias & Juana Burghardt auf der Grundlage der Vorarbeit von Doo-Hwan und Regine Choi und mit einem Nachwort von Tobias Burghardt. ISBN 978-3-927648-34-0 마종기 Mah Chonggi Augen aus Tau Werkauswahl 1960-2010 Gedichte. Aus dem Koreanischen und mit einem Nachwort von Gwi-Bun Schibel-Yang und Wolfgang Schibel. ISBN 978-3-927648-45-6

은희경 Eun Hee-Kyung Wer glücklich ist, schaut nicht auf die Uhr Sieben Erzählungen. Aus dem Koreanischen von Hyuk-Sook Kim und Manfred Selzer. ISBN 978-3-927648-68-5

김경욱 Kim Kyung-Uk Was? Leslie Cheung ist tot? Erzählungen. Aus dem Koreanischen von Hyuk-Sook Kim und Manfred Selzer. ISBN 978-3-927648-67-8

정영문 Jung Young Moon Mondestrunken Roman. Aus dem Koreanischen von Philipp Haas und Lee Byong-Hun und mit einem Nachwort von Philipp Haas. ISBN 978-3-927648-43-2

황석영 Hwang Sok-Yong UNKRAUT und andere Prosa Erzählungen. Aus dem Koreanischen von Kang Seung-Hee, Oh Dong-Sik, Torsten Zaiak und Martin Tutsch. ISBN 978-3-927648-36-4

김훈 Kim Hoon Schwertgesang Roman. Aus dem Koreanischen von Heidi Kang und Sohyun Ahn. ISBN 978-3-927648-22-7

채만식 Chae Manshik Ein Frühlingstag im Paradies Roman. Aus dem Koreanischen und mit einem Nachwort von Yunhui Baek. ISBN 978-3-927648-47-0

김유정 Kim Yujong Kamelien Erzählungen. Aus dem Koreanischen und mit einem Nachwort von Yunhui Baek. ISBN 978-3-927648-50-0

시중 점점 구입 혹은 출판사로 직접 주문 가능. In jeder guten Buchhandlung erhältlich oder direkt ab Verlag bestellbar.

Editon Delta

Stuttgart | Germany

www.edition-delta.de https://www.edition-delta.de/buecher/koreanische-literatur/

POETRY WITHOUT BORDERS

A unique international poetry project

When the Minister of Culture handed over to Germain Droogenbroodt the Kathak Literary Award 2015 for his outstanding contribution to world literature, he did not mention his nationality, but named him a cosmopolitan poet. Germain Droogenbroodt is an excellent poet, published in 19 countries, including in Bangladesh, nominated for the Nobel Prize of Literature, but also a tireless promotor of international poetry. He founded in 1984 POINT Editions, publishing modern international poetry with the idea to do something, however little, for a more human world, crossing borders of race, nationalism, religion and added to POINT the international project Poetry without Borders, publishing every week an excellent poem from all over the world with a nice illustration. Meanwhile translated and published weekly in 29 languages, including Arab, Chinese, Japanese, Kurdish, Farsi, Hindi, Tamil and…Bangla.

Interested? Send an email to: elpoeta@point-editions.com and you will receive FREE and without commercial publicity every week a great poem. At www.point-editions.com you will find ample selection of the 666 already published poems in many languages.

editions

I WANT TO BE EVERYTHING IN LOVE

I want to be everything in love the lover the beloved dizziness the breeze the reflecting water and that white cloud vaporous indecisive that covers us for an instant.

Claribel Alegría, Nicaragua (1924 – 2018)

FOOTBALL PLAYER

He’s a football player. Kicks a ball, every day, he kicks a ball. One day, He kicked love up high into the sky. It stayed there And didn’t come down. People thought it must be the sun, The moon, or a new star. Inside me, A ball that never comes down, Hangs suspended in the sky. You can see it become fire, Become love Become a star.

KAZUKO SHIRAISHI, Japan (1931)

Road 123, House 18/A Gulshan 1, Dhaka 1212 Bangladesh Tel: 8802 8823249 Mob: +880 1713062091 E-mail: bilkis@aci-bd.com Website: www.cclbd.net Do you need TAILOR MADE?

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