Meanwhile...

a poem, and a call

(I thank the friend, musician, who set a path towards this raag)

Isn’t it frustrating that things begin in the middle of becoming? The night is a river, already in spate, flooding the dry fields of a craving pen. Work waits outside the living room, and a thought flirts with an old poem, as if it were a drug. I know the world only through language. This is my bane, and my boon. I know the city, through language, but also outside of it. To you I give the former, in the hope that it will wake up elsewhere as memory. When a thought changes bodies, it is translation. And because language lives in place, because even the word has a home, I hunger recklessly for the answer to silence. I think of Nanak waiting outside the temple, and the metre of his anti-aarti forming in his mind, as the world awakes to a god.

In his Lover’s Discourse, Barthes touches upon ‘waiting’. The last parable he shares, if taken out of the context of a man waiting for a woman, opens up a window into epiphany. Some are always outside this window. Others, like the mandarin, come to a conclusion:

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him “when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away.

The trope of waiting is everpresent in the poetry of love. From the Abhisarika, to the poems of longing of the ancient Prakrit poets (There was a post on this, but it was on the old website, I will share it again soon), to Mervin’s Separation: “Your absence has gone through me/ Like thread through a needle./ Everything I do is stitched with its color.” But anticipation is also a characteristic of divine fervour, of the object of longing further than the reach of mortal imagination. Waiting is the absurd. Waiting is knowing that the subject will only find its destination in a single sentiment - meanwhile…

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Today’s edition is a precursor to a call for poems. I am working on a space for original poems, a kind of online little magazine, whose first edition is based on the thematic of ‘City’. For this endeavour, I thought it appropriate to reach out to you, my reader, also, for funding. I hope to reach a target of Rs. 10,000 that will allow me to pay for the logistics of setting up such a space. The target is modest because the effort is. Those who’d like to contribute, please write to poetly@pm.me, and I will share a google pay account. Of course, there is no compulsion, and all I can promise at this point, is mention and attention in the edition when it does (inshallah) see the light of day.

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It is raining here, where I am, in May. A pleasant lull has fallen on the place. The thought glimmers for a moment before it comes to you as this text. I hope you are finding the time to write.

If you feel like responding, you can write back to poetly@pm.me.
I will write back, when I find the time, and the space. I hope the summer is kind.

If you like what you read, do consider ‘buying me a coffee’.