‘Another drop of hope in flow’: Poems that grapple with the reality of an imperfect world

Fani

a storm
like us
raging
like us
ruthless
like us
circling
like us
rising
like us
spiralling
like us
tiring
like us
repenting
like us
wearying
like us
relenting
unlike us.

[Written while travelling to the ancient village of Gohaldia in the hinterland of Odisha, India, which was recovering from the ruthless cyclone, Fani, in 2019. The cyclone displaced more than a million people in the state as a result of the indiscriminate destruction of natural

ecosystems. A visit to Mayurbhanj that year was almost a beckoning of my own ancestral history, deeply intertwined with that of Odisha’s from a time of the Bengal Renaissance. It was during this journey that I witnessed the aftermath of the cyclone – and, more importantly, the resilience of the region’s people, hard at work.]

No cure but poetry is sure

what if I told you a poem was stronger?
what if I told you a poem fought longer?

the poem worked from away and worked from home
on burning lands, bursting seas

debilitating injury and disease
a para’s cetamol
rhyma moclobemide
sane-itiser
prose-thetics

healing the cursed
aiding the nursed
a spell four thousand years old
with the universe in its fold

what if I told you
it’ll fix this anxious, cold you

a poem in quarantine
a poem in a glass of wine

enough to cure a species diseased
enough to resurrect a humanity deceased.

[This poem was written in the early days of the pandemic to reiterate the mysterious beauty of the poetry we all carry within us as individuals and as a collective humanity; how the medicine to the ailing situation of loneliness is...

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