Mango Bites

Again, About a Poem – Afsar

జూన్ 2015

A Certain Incongruity

Word was a paper boat then.
A Titanic it was, revolving
around the world on scanty water

Now word is a broken boat.
A rock figurine unable to move
even when surrounded by oceans

All the poesy became debris
when word dropped to the ground
Now we are only moving amongst pebbles

One may hear an occasional sound
But there are no sounds of breath
Not even a small sigh around here

Occasions are aplenty just to talk!
But each context became an incongruity

Bloodshed, tears
explosions and mass deaths
are all usual trifles
All are incongruities to poetry

Amidst the beauty demons
who look for symmetry even in corpse face
I’m searching for a coarse word
that has not been depicted so far

In the deep slumber of language
which covered itself with lexicons
I’m looking for a word
that has dropped all its embellishments

***

Again, About a Poem

1

Digging the ground a bit
and strapping the time in a phial
we buried it. Remember?

A child’s merriment it is.
May be you don’t remember.
Is it the same about poem too?

2

Not having anything to pen
for you, me and perhaps for everybody…
Like the homework not likeable precisely at once
and the never loveable syllabus…

Not that there’s no agony
But unable we are, to write about pain
except others’

Weeping with borrowed eyes
and sprinting on stilts –
Perhaps ordinary wooden leg
is not enough to write the inner poem

3

Not counting in terms of own or alien though
When did you stop wandering in your body?
Won’t you give me an inkling of it?
Of late, even the skin
is looking like other’s shirt.
Which is truth and which is not,
will be known by the words uttered.

4

Nice that a mine is found
which we assumed as a poem

You, I and everybody
have dug extensively inside and outside
But is poem obtainable
by digging at wrong place?

Do you remember poem’s birth?
Perhaps you don’t.
It’s a childhood’s merriment after all.

***

Origin (Telugu): Afsar
Translated by: Elanaaga