Poem Do Pyaza
I have stopped writing poems
Poems when written, are unyielding
Unyielding since they rock paper-chair like an old maid
A maid who sulks, frowns, and sings songs of antiquity
Antiquity with romance, but lack contemporary touch
Touch - right! That’s what my poems need
Need skillful carving on a chopping board not edit table
Table on which it will be marinated by coarse fingers
Fingers which can touch and tell sugar and spices
Spices that add adventure for my eyes
Eyes which are now a wok
Wok where my poem will crackle when tossed
Tossed, or on a steamboat where they will bake slowly
Slowly, slowly will they acquire a crust, golden and crisp
Crisp like the autumn wind which vehemently blows
Blows your mind such a poem I will keep
Keep for your palate to savor
Savor a poem that I have not written
But, cooked
From the Parapet of Lady Hardinge Hospital
20th April 1991, Datia, MP
The town I was born in was
coughed up in a bout of allergy
by a lesser-known god
Phlegm spit and flushed
Forgotten, a sure reject
orphaned in its infancy
My umbilical cord cut in a hospital ward
named after the wife of an essential saheb
who went about doing chores 100 years ago
- so commonplace, legends know of his
wife’s death, not his life
dust here is the evolving layer
of history ubiquitous in patches
Brown and parched, in this diametrically
challenged town
People here believe red-stained
wooden doors bring father’s home
and day-on-day in prayers
spew all things red in true
hereditary manner
anger, anguish, envy, setting sun
betel juice on the rough edges
of the welcome board which
when new, read‘
'This city welcomes you with open arms’
There is so much neglect in all eyes
that barren land let a peepal
grow unnoticed
Achita Khare, born and brought up in North India, believes she truly grew up in Bangalore. The city she loves for dosa, coffee, and what it made her in that order. She tussles with numbers by the day (a marketer by profession), and words by the night. While trying to make sense of each, sometimes she fails at both. At others emerge a poem or a prose. When not doing either she hides behind books by Gulzar, Tagore, Murakami, or of Harry Potter.