To Dream, Perchance to Change
By Sandeep Banerjee
Across cultures, poetry has always been a key site for articulating the relationship between the fantastic and the transformative mediated by the shaping powers of the imagination.
Posts tagged ‘Poetry’
Mar 6
Four Poems by Sutputra Radheye
By Sutputra Radheye
Flowers wore burkhas
And sat in rows
To form a bagh
Three Poems by Sukla Singha
By Sukla Singha
Shakuntala Road reeks of stale gerberas and lilies.
It silently awaits July rains, wedding
invitations and dead bodies,
in no particular order.
Poem: A Searing Jeremiad on Water Scarcity from Zehra Nigah
By Raza Naeem
The child laughed a lot watching the peacock dance
As if in those large eyes
Filling all the peacock’s colours
The light beating of the awakened tiny soft palm
Broke the swaying jungle’s calm.
Poem: Home
By Somrita Ganguly
I hear the historians discuss history
I hear the linguists discuss etymology
I hear politicians talk about patriotism and nationalism
And wonder where my allegiance lies
বাংলাদেশ/مشرقی پاکستان/ हिंदुस्तान
Bharat/ India/ Hindustan.
Poem: Partition, 1947
By Varsha Sundriyal
Wives tearing their hair out.
Not sindoor but blood on heads.
Clutching their tattered clothes running for their lives.
Hiding children on their breast shielding them from the bullets.
Poem: Home as Home
By Sourav Debnath
Never have I thought home as home
Until I was dragged out from mine own.
In that unconscious, uncertain turn,
I left my home to burn.
News of Drought
By Man Prasad Subba
With a flick of the remote control
I teleport myself
to an entertainment channel
And to another whisky
On ice
Guest Editorial
By Pooja Garg Singh
In this Café Dissensus issue on Faiz, we bring together essays on Faiz’s life and on his poetry of love and protest. The essays, stories, and poems in the second half of the issue are inspired by Faiz’s poetry.
This stained light, this night-bitten dawn
By Ali Madeeh Hashmi
It has been more than three decades since Faiz’s death in Lahore. “Subh-e Aazadi” remains as relevant as ever, sixty eight years after Pakistan came into being. If anything, the sorrows and agonies of Faiz’s native land have intensified and perhaps this time it is Faiz, like Waris Shah, who is being asked to ‘speak from inside his grave’.
A conversation with Salima Hashmi
By Saba Ahmad
Once Faiz accepted a Sardarji’s offer to inaugurate his shop in London, when I asked him what the shop sold, he had no idea. He just said, “He asked me with so much love, I could not say no, it would break his heart.”
Café Dissensus 