an account of Poetry Sunday @ Cubbon Park with The Alipore Post and other pilgrims
the kindness of strangers
Isn't it strange that the word is a name of a thing? that all our lives we build homes for language to live in, but there is no word for the first time we knew love - for the immaculate conception of a freedom forgotten before the christening of time in our own personal bildungsromans. no quirky turn of phrase which captures the nervous energy of leaves abuzz with the gossip of light. no metaphor for the frisson of those who have seen. those who have braided this quivering thing, this impertinent child of a city. those who have feathered their visions, frayed their testimonies under the trees before us. those who planted pipe dreams into the earth, now ancient with the weight of their tropical catastrophes of insight. who embarrassed the alchemy of the day that did not know what to do with their questions.
But there are poems, quiet bystanders whose knowing smiles are enough for us. As if from a painting that has caught reality in its swirling pastels, we discern colour, and unspool feeling. and when the honesty of their witness comes alive and sits quietly beside us, we turn pink, clicking unsure fingers and sighing expectant eyes, tickled by the seeds that have taken fortunate root in the red silt of our imaginations.
oh to wake into sleep, slope into dream, to photosynthesise this persistent beat, this eternal spring of anxious wonder, into poetry. to be engulfed in the careful description of a thing whose name we do not know yet. to find comradeship in the knowledge that love is loss turned inside out, that the city could be a forest without memory, and look, even the sun has turned up today, after days of winterbreath, to listen to our inconsequential laughter, our annotations in the book of life that is open everyday. but then how would we know even google maps doesn't know the location where solitude sits in their 4 by 5 with shutter half down, selling nondescript poems that recycle the past into future. how would we know that the wingspan of a lifetime is sudden laughter?
Sometimes I wonder about enlightenment, I wonder whether even kya baat hain is actually a question in disguise, only one that is comfortable in the enigma of its epiphany. I wonder as we share the old edges of pages that have suddenly remembered fire, whether those dead poets who we feast on with the audacity of mango flies, laugh at us. whether they nod fervently like we do when we discover that trees are kind, (and we could be too if we listened hard enough), that they leave little notes on the wings of birds, and the dust that dances to the music of parks. I wonder about those archivists, sitting somewhere behind a dusty bookshelf that is actually a sidestreet where the lights never come on, those midwives of beauty. those poets who write because the burden of truth bursts in their bodies when the time touches them, and we sit at the centre of the mushroom cloud that is their nuclear release. It is a kindness, nothing else. this gift of sweet death in the company of those whose curiosity flits in their eyes before emerging as tenderness.
that is what poetry is, is it not? the kindness of strangers.
Note: These three poems were read by people at the ‘sunday city poetry meet’ yesterday. The First poem ‘Bangalore Blues’ is a song. Ajay Nair’s poem was first published in The Bombay Literary Magazine. A couple of poems that were read have been shared on Poetly archives before, including - Vikram Seth’s Night in Jiangning, and T.S. Eliot’s Preludes. A. K. Ramanujan, Poornima Laxmaneshwar, Jhilmil Beckenridge, Anjum Hasan, Tishani Doshi, and Adrienne Rich were among some of the poets we met and chilled with (through their poems only). I will share these poems if I am able to find the originals in the coming days.
I must thank fellow artist/poet/archivist/community mobiliser, Rohini, of The Alipore Post once again, for collaborating in conjuring up this sunday morning of poetry in a matter of minutes.
I’m truly happy that my weekend was hijacked by this :)
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We must do this again!