Driven | G. S. Katz
I’m driven by lust
But defined by love
Power and fury
Flowers and sweetness
original poets
Feminine Mansion | Naduni
The mansion is wide, long and high,
Its whiteness makes it a mammoth recess,
Where we are expected to live
In eternal comfort.
The little girl is frustrated.
She yearns for a change of air.
We sit together at a square table,
And look through the curtain,
She tells me about her friends’ boyfriends,
I warn her,
About how disgraceful it is to love,
to touch
And to be touched
‘It is the animal pleasure’
I tell her.
Thus the daytime
Wastes in our mansion.
The aunty gets angry
For every trite slip
Her body is wasted,
A mass of saggy muscles
She is both the mother and the father
Of the mansion
Who am i?
I am another woman in the feminine mansion
The emblem of purity,
The untouched petal,
A chaste Mary!
We pass our day and night.
Yearning for rain.
Constantly licking
Our parched lips
‘It is raining!’
One day she shouts.
Both of us run to the vast terrace garden,
Only to find it is only teasing,
With a drop or two.
‘It’s not going to rain
Let’s get indoors’
I tell her.
That night
When I’m lying alone on my single bed,
I hear the inviting rain,
But I choose to sleep on.
Hands | G. S. Katz
Holding hands with you
Like ducks swimming in pairs
Never far apart
Love, devotion, unity
Two Tongues | P.K. Deb
For my effective expression,
wonderful maybe but
I possess a pair of tongues-
one by birth and another by profession.
Ever-active these are to simplify
the jumbled lanes of my heart to other,
yet unable to restrict a critical estimation,
as these differ from each other
so similar these are too to some extent.
Different these are in location
by the distance of more than five oceans,
in emotional expression-
if Windows XP is the former, easy to handle,
the latter is nothing but Windows 8,
needs extra- care and fuel
and in ethical justification,
communal is my tongue by birth
but universal is the tongue by profession.
Yet these are spontaneous and hand in hand
in spraying honey and custard oil
in the ears of friends and foes
Well disciplined these are
In maintaining a line of control and jurisdiction,
as in the outdoor-
my hands are outstretched to embrace the universe
and the professional tongue-
forgetting all jealousy and hatred
wishes to be loud in uttering,
”I Love You”,
but in the indoor,
quite spontaneous and communal I am
in using my tongue by birth
to express my love to my beloved wife,
”Aami Tomake Bhalo bashi”
an oriental expression of love,
meaning, the same- I Love You.
How to Write a Love Poem | Naduni
One of my friends said
You should never marry
A poet!
Why?
He would write love poems
When you are together
And break-up poems
If you leave him, and
Elegies- if you die.
Thus you are raw material for
His creative machine.
I never agreed with her
What’s wrong in using your lover
For Poetry?
The world doesn’t let you be
A Marxist, a Feminist, a Nazi or any
Kind of rebel
So poetry can’t have a social impact
You get me?
If you don’t the price is your head
Morality is out of style
So no one would bother to read your moralistic poems
War poems are outdated too
Anyway the NGOs won’t let you write war poems
Like Tennyson’s
So what is left to you
Is that little boy
Who has a crush on you
Or who is your crush
So you take him out
Rip him open
Separate each part
Scan and analyse
Then categorize
After that he is ready to be written about.
When you write
You can distort his looks, characteristics,
His history etc.,
And upgrade them or degrade
As you like
So basically you can do anything
With that crush of you
But you should inject the word “love”
Here and there with some sentiments.
For that purpose
You can add some images of
The beach, the sky etc.,
So your love poem is ready
And your creativity is justified
If you say “yes it is”
To the question,
“Is this poem based on your personal experience?”
Fruit Stand | G. S. Katz
He has a stand at the corner of my block
Fruits and Vegetables only
24/7
Rain or shine
I call him Fruit Man
There’s two of them working 12-hour gigs
Like a nurse’s shift in a hospital
But they’re not, they are the Fruit Guys
In their country they could have been doctors
Accountants or Lawyers too
At the very least cable TV installers
Here they sell fruit
No complaints from these guys
A milk crate to sit on
Stoic and friendly enough
One box of strawberries or two?