Chaitanya

Here is a poem by Arun Kolatkar, the Indian poet. Written in English, it is titled “Chaitanya”:

‘Sweet as grapes

are the stones of Jejuri’,

said Chaitanya.

 

 

He propped a stone

in his mouth

and spat out gods.

Words

A Poem by Kamala Das

All round me are words, and words and words,

They grow on me like leaves, they never

Seem to stop their slow growing

From within….But I tell myself, words

Are a nuisance, beware of them, they

Can be so many things, a

Chasm where running feet must pause, to

Look, a sea with paralysing waves,

A blast of burning air or,

A knife most willing to cut your best

Friend’s throat…Words are a nuisance, but

They grow on me like leaves on a tree,

They never seem to stop their coming

From a silence, somewhere deep within….

P.S. Kamala Das/ Kamala Suraiyya/ Madhavikutty is one of India’s most celebrated writers and  a writer par excellence even in the international scenario. Her poetry is often termed as “confessional” as she employs the  “personal” mode in most of her writings. A must-read writer for literature enthusiasts and students 🙂

Someone Else’s Song

A Poem by Kamala Das

I am a million, million people

Talking all at once, with voices

Raised in clamour, like maids

At village-wells.

 

I am a million, million deaths

ox-clustered, each a drying seed

Someday to be shed, to grow for

Someone else, a memory.

 

I am a million, million births

Flushed with triumphant blood, each a growing

Thing that thrusts its long-nailed hands

To scar the hollow air.

 

I am a million, million silences

Strung like crystal beads

Onto someone else’s

Song.

P.S: I have posted this poem here for those students studying Das and have difficulty in finding her poetry. 🙂

Stop Girl – Teen Top

Artist: Teen Top

Title: Stop Girl

Album: No.1(2013)

Producer: Brave Brothers

ROMANIZATION

“jeonhwahgi waeh ? na mot mideo ?”
ikeon sarangi anya jebal nal naebeoryeodwo
ikeon sarangi anya jebal nal naebeoryeodwoStop girl nal naebeoryeodwo
nan ije jichyeosseo modeun ge da ni uneun sorimajeodo
Stop girl nal naebeoryeodwo
modeun ge jikyeowo jikyeowo da ikeon sarangi anyasumi makhyeo neo ttae-me teukbyeorhi nae-ga jalmothan geo hana eom-neunde
neoneun han shi-gani meolda ha-go kyeso-khaeseo jeonhwahha-go
eodi-eseo meohaneunji teummannamyeon checginrsquo;ha-go
sarangiran pinggyearae neon neomu manheun geo-seul barae neon nareul wonhae
24/7 CCTV cheoreom nareul kamshihaneun ni moseube sumi makhyeo
munja-geomsa yeongsangtong-hwah keugeot-do mojaraseo yokuhaneun bimilbeonho
dodaeche nareul mwollo boneunkeoya mideum ttawiineun eom-neunkeoni
ni-ga marhaneun sarangeun ireonkeoni?
Oh girl jo-geumman nal pu-reojwo ireon sarangeun orae motka keumbang bureojyeo
nan chigeum manhi himdeu-reo neo ttae-me himdeu-reo jibcha-geun sarangi anya
don’t get it twisted

Stop girl nal naebeoryeodwo
nan ije jichyeosseo modeun ge da ni uneun sorimajeodo
Stop girl nal naebeoryeodwo
modeun ge jikyeowo jikyeowo da ikeon sarangi anya

nae dwiireul chochneun neoye nunbichi nal michike hae
u-llineun ni bel sori-ga nal sum jugike hae
neon mae-il cheomcheom deo nae mo-geul joyeowah (nan jichyeo-ga)
ije deoneun ni songil-jocha nan wonhaji anha

nae-ga museun handusal meo-geun eorinaedo aninde 22sa-re tonggeumshi-gan
it-daneun ge mari dwehni? neon naye nae, ni-ga anin yeojachingu ma paby
girl stop giving me hard time
an geuraedo shinkyeong sseuril manhaseo bappa kolchi-ga apa chamkyeoneun no
han balchag dwiiro mu-lleoseo then go

Stop girl nal naebeoryeodwo
nan ije jichyeosseo modeun ge da ni uneun sorimajeodo
Stop girl nal naebeoryeodwo
modeun ge jikyeowo jikyeowo da ikeon sarangi anya

ije keuman jom hae neoro inhae mae-ili summakhineunde neomu himdeunde, nan neomu himdeunde
jebal keuman jom hae neo ttae-mune michil keot kata Girl I can’t ta-ge it anymore

Stop girl nal naebeoryeodwo
nan ije jichyeosseo modeun ge da ni uneun sorimajeodo
Stop girl nal naebeoryeodwo
modeun ge jikyeowo jikyeowo da ikeon sarangi anya

ENGLISH

“My phone? Why? Can’t you trust me?”
This is not love, please leave me alone
This is not love, please leave me alone

Stop girl, leave me alone
I’m tired of it now, everything, even your crying sound
Stop girl, leave me alone
I’m sick of everything, this is not love

I’m suffocating because of you – I didn’t even do anything wrong
You say that being 1 hour away is too far and you keep calling me
Whenever you can, you ask where I am and what I’m doing, checkin’ on me
With the excuse of love, you expect too much, you want me
Having you watch over me 24/7 like a CCTV makes me suffocate
You check my texts, you video call me and if that’s not enough, you ask for my password
What do you see me as? Do you not have a single ounce of trust?
Is this the love that you’re talking about?
Oh girl, cut me loose a little bit, a love like this won’t last long, it’ll be cracked and break apart soon
It’s really hard right now, it’s hard because of you, obsession is not love
Don’t get it twisted

Stop girl, leave me alone
I’m tired of it now, everything, even your crying sound
Stop girl, leave me alone
I’m sick of everything, this is not love

Your eyes that chase after my back drives me crazy
Your ringtone on my phone makes me feel suffocated
Every day, you squeeze my throat more and more (I’m getting tired)
I don’t even want your touch anymore

I’m not a little kid, I’m 22 years old but you give me a curfew?
You do think that makes sense? You are not my nanny, you’re my girlfriend ma baby
Girl stop giving me hard time
I have a lot of other things to take care of, I’m busy and I have a headache so please don’t butt in, no
Take a step back then go

Stop girl, leave me alone
I’m tired of it now, everything, even your crying sound
Stop girl, leave me alone
I’m sick of everything, this is not love

Please stop now, I am suffocating every day because of you
It’s so hard, it’s so hard
Please stop now, I think I’ll go crazy because of you
Girl I can’t take it anymore

Stop girl, leave me alone
I’m tired of it now, everything, even your crying sound
Stop girl, leave me alone
I’m sick of everything, this is not love

Romanization: lyricupdates.com

English: pop!gasa

Prometheus

A Poem by Charles Tomlinson

Summer thunder darkens, and its climbing

Cumulae, disowning our scale in the zenith,

Electrify this music: the evening is falling apart.

Castles-in-air; on earth: green, livid fire.

The radio simmers with static to the strains

Of this mock last-day of nature and of art.

 

 

We have lived through apocalypse too long:

Scriabin’s dinosaurs! Trombones for the transformation

That arrived by train at the Finland Station,

To bury its hatchet after thirty years in the brain

Of Trotsky. Alexander Nikolayevitch, the events

Were less merciful than your mob of instruments.

 

 

Too many drowning voices cram this waveband.

I see Lenin’s face by yours –

Yours, the fanatic ego of eccentricity against

The systematic son of a schools inspector

Tyutchev on desk—for the strong man reads

Poets as the antisemite pleads: ‘A Jew was my friend.’

 

 

Cymballed firesweeps. Prometheus came down

In more than orchestral flame and Kérensky fled

Before it. The babel of continents gnaw now

And tears at the silk of those harmonies that seemed

So dangerous once. You dreamed an end

Where the rose of the world would go out like a close in music.

 

 

Populations drag the partitions down

And we are a single town of warring suburbs:

I cannot hear such music for its consequence:

Each sense was to have been reborn

Out of a storm of perfumes and light

To a white world, an in-the-beginning.

 

 

In the beginning, the strong man reigns:

Trotsky, was it not then you brought yourself

To judgment and to execution, when you forgot

Where terror rules, justice turns arbitrary?

Chromatic Prometheus, myth of fire,

It is history topples you in the zenith.

 

 

Blok, too, wrote The Scythians

Who should have known: he who howls

With the whirlwind, with the whirlwind goes down.

In this, was Lenin guiltier than you

When, out of merciless patience grew

The daily prose such poetry prepares for?

 

 

Scriabin, Blok, men of extremes,

History treads out the music of your dreams

Through blood, and cannot close like this

In the perfection of anabasis. It stops. The trees

Continue raining though the rain has ceased

In a cooled world of incessant codas:

 

 

Hard edges of the houses press

On the after-music senses, and refuse to burn,

Where an ice cream van circulates the estate

Playing Greensleeves, and at the city’s

Stale new frontier even ugliness

Rules with the cruel mercy of solidities.

 

P.S. I am hoping that students would find this useful. No intention to breach any rules or laws. Just for educational purposes. Cheers!

Enterprise

A Poem by Nissim Ezekiel

It started as a pilgrimage,
Exalting minds and making all
The burdens light. The second stage
Explored but did not test the call.
The sun beat down to match our rage.

We stood it very well, I thought,
Observed and put down copious notes
On things the peasants sold and bought,
The way of serpents and of goats,
Three cities where a sage had taught.

But when the differences arose
On how to cross a desert patch,
We lost a friend whose stylish prose
Was quite the best of all our batch.
A shadow falls on us – and grows.

Another phase was reached when we
were twice attacked, and lost our way.
A section claimed its liberty
To leave the group. I tried to pray.
Our leader said he smelt the sea.

We noticed nothing as we went,
A straggling crowd of little hope,
Ignoring what the thunder meant,
Deprived of common needs like soap.
Some were broken, some merely bent.

When, finally, we reached the place,
We hardly knew why we were there.
The trip had darkened every face,
Our deeds were neither great nor rare.
Home is where we have to gather grace.

Obituary

A Poem by A.K. Ramanujan

Father, when he passed on,
left dust
on a table of papers,
left debts and daughters,
a bedwetting grandson
named by the toss
of a coin after him,

a house that leaned
slowly through our growing
years on a bent coconut
tree in the yard.
Being the burning type,
he burned properly
at the cremation

as before, easily
and at both ends,
left his eye coins
in the ashes that didn’t
look one bit different,
several spinal discs, rough,
some burned to coal, for sons

to pick gingerly
and throw as the priest
said, facing east
where three rivers met
near the railway station;
no longstanding headstone
with his full name and two dates

to hold in their parentheses
everything he didn’t quite
manage to do himself,
like his caesarian birth
in a brahmin ghetto
and his death by heart-
failure in the fruit market.

But someone told me
he got two lines
in an inside column
of a Madras newspaper
sold by the kilo
exactly four weeks later
to streethawkers

who sell it in turn
to the small groceries
where I buy salt,
coriander,
and jaggery
in newspaper cones
that I usually read

for fun, and lately
in the hope of finding
these obituary lines.
And he left us

a changed mother
and more than
one annual ritual.

Love Poem for A Wife

A poem by A.K. Ramanujan

Really what keeps us apart
at the end of years is unshared
childhood. You cannot, for instance,

meet my father. He is some years
dead. Neither can I meet yours:
he has lately lost his temper
and mellowed.

In the transverse midnight gossip
of cousins’ reunions among
brandy fumes, cashews and the Absences
of grandparents, you suddenly grow
nostalgic for my past and I
envy you your village dog-ride
and the mythology

of the sever crazy aunts.
You begin to recognize me
as I pass from ghost to real
and back again in the albums
of family rumours, in brothers’
anecdotes of how noisily
father bathed,

slapping soap on his back;
find sources for a familiar
sheep-mouth look in a sepia wedding
picture of father in a turban,
mother standing on her bare
splayed feet, silver rings
on her second toes;

and reduce the entire career
of my recent unique self
to the compulsion of some high
sentence in His Smilesian diary.
And your father, gone irrevocably
in age, after changing every day
your youth’s evenings,

he will acknowledge the wickedness
of no reminiscence: no, not
the burning end of the cigarette
in the balcony, pacing
to and fro as you came to the gate
late, after what you thought
was an innocent

date with a nice Muslim friend
who only hinted at touches.
Only two weeks ago, in Chicago,
you and your brother James started
one of you old drag-out fights
about where the bathroom was
in the backyard,

north or south of the well
next to the jackfruit tree
in your father’s father’s house
in Alleppey. Sister-in-law
and I were blank cut-outs
fitted to our respective
slots in a room

really nowhere as the two of you
got down to the floor t draw
blueprints of a house from memory
of everything, from newspapers
to the backs of envelopes
and road-maps of the United States
that happened

to flap in the other room
in a midnight wind: you wagered heirlooms
and husband’s earnings on what the Uncle in Kuwait
would say about the Bathroom
and the Well, and the dying,
by now dead,

tree next to it. Probably
only the Egyptians had it right:
their kings had sisters for queens
to continue the incests
of childhood into marriage.
or we should do as well-meaning
Hindus did.

betroth us before birth
forestalling separate horoscopes
and mother’s first periods,
and wed us in the oral cradle
and carry marriage back into
the namelessness of childhoods.