It is a marwa evening today, all browns and bourbon. It is the kind of evening that sheepishly offers silence, asking me to fill it with colour. All is black, except for the crickets’ din.
Tracy K. Smith, the American Poet Laureate, and a longtime showrunner for The Slowdown podcast (an early inspiration for this archive - Ada Limon is the face of this now), writes about the relationship between the ‘intimate’ and the ‘vast’ in poetry. I find this a fascinating idea, creating a kind of geocentric gaze for an art form, without compromising on the lived identity of the creator. It turns writing into an act of surprising power, and at the same time, a thing of great vulnerability. The poem is sensitive to its lived environment even as a product of its time, not merely because of its meaning. It plots the unsaid truths of human relationship on the axis of language. Poetry is imagined as an archive of the complex stalemates in colliding journeys of people, families and communities.
That it serves as social commentary, and historical testimony is a familiar idea, but this is something else. The insertion of self, sometimes by exclusion, in a carousel of news and current affairs has a very different meaning for this current time, from say, the time of Sylvia Plath, or Eunice De’souza, or Arun Kolatkar. This is a question of representation and reflexive practice.
There are so many mirrors, and still poets find the truth in themselves, while searching for it in the world around them. Still they see with clarity.
Sometimes a poem sits in the corner of the room, quietly observing, persevering. It is a dark room. Only one window frames the moonlight streaming through. Words that draw out the living world of night are sown in silence. The song is amost a lori, an innocent question asked by the flute, and answered with the quiet resolve of Piyush Mishra’s tired voice.
A mother cries, the moon beams, the small of hunger grows alongside dreams that comfort sleep.
Note. Please forgive the very amateur english translation of the song. I’m unsatisfied by many of the lines in the english version. Do share any translations or responses, you have.
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