Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Naomi Shihab Nye,
if i ever take my poetry seriously it would be because i am greatly inspired by her.
life turns each one of us around differently doesn't it?
so most of the time conflict, sorrow, loss create more and more of themselves in numerous worlds , in the hearts of numerous people.
In the mean while, Nye and people like her live amidst sufferers and weave suffering differently.


Making a Fist- Naomi Shihab Nye


For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother. 
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.
A always spoke about his boyhood years with such brightness, adoration and unadorned joy.
Then many years later, a grown man now, on his trip to the Himalayas, he took a picture of his childhood and put it in a time capsule forever.
Alexi Murdoch

Whether i am happy/pensive/dreamy/unperturbed/awake/sleepless. Your songs color my lackadaisical life. 
I will only love you more.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

One of my most favorite Indian contemporary poets Arun Kolatkar. He writes both in English and Marathi.

"No more a place for worship, this place is nothing less than a house of god"
 

Dear Jack Gilbert who taught me that "Everything worth doing , is worth doing badly".
To him Failing and Flying and Refusing Heaven. The giver of my most loved poems.

"Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life. "
 
---Going There, By Gilbert 

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

So, today i was lazing, flipping through books and music
It was one of those days which you wake into and forget as soon as you fall asleep, to disappear into the greater oblivion of many such other days of life.
Strangely enough I found new inspiration for my jazz indulgence and i absolutely loved every Benny Goodman song!

And the song which just made my day. Its called Sing, Sing, Sing.. :)