NABINA DAS - Featured Poet

No Country, No Names

The young girl in a sari was

Off to the library, her hands

Clasping books, she didn’t see

The truck crawl up behind her

Stuffed with soldiers wearing

Leafy helmets, false implants in

The heart of that shell-shocked

Macadamized Bengal town

Her face a sorry storybook

Quite a few pages torn

When they found her by

A garbage dump, stared at

By the ancient panhandler

The poor bastard refused arrest

Shouted abuses, got suitably

Thrashed by the police

A young man had whispered

The night before: show your palm

The red henna peacock from

The evening’s merry festivities

And she read him a poem

About crocodiles in snare

Until they fell asleep in

Each other’s arms, dreaming

There was a river, grass and

Flowers shrouding its banks

Its depth unknown, but easy

For the rebels who could swim

The same night Yahya Khan

Made quick plans to strike

Universities where students

Danced to songs of Tagore

That was a night when nervous

Sirens screamed on and on, his

Would-be bride was picked up

And thrown. Folding up

Maps that fooled, didn’t show

A country of hearts, he left

A peacock mourned for her

And him. No country yet for them.

(Published in Into the Migrant City, Kolkata: Writers Workshop India, 2014)

Bio:
Nabina Das is a Hyderabad-based poet and writer who has authored four books. She is a Commonwealth Writers correspondent 2016, a Charles Wallace fellowship winner 2012 and a Sangam House fiction fellowship winner 2012.

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ANDREW BELLON - Featured Poet (Tribute)

(Love Evolves) Love evolves; colors my troublous quarks. I lie in the shadows of our tangled light as under sleeping trees. Silence has a place here as the continuance of a holy text. We are dazzled matter; the silence spins in the shadows. Waves, particles, hieroglyphs, whatever we are, we are part of the gliding night's adornments; of the night that holds like memory airy relicts of the known and rising light of my emptiness filling. Long have I discarded my physics books and indulged in poetry until I came across an Andrew Bellon untitled poem that spoke of the physics of love and I found all the quarks and gluons and quanta and all other hypothetical fundamental particles striking back at the interface of my consciousness where hieroglyphs form and theories evolve. Love evolves too coloring the agitation of the elements of matter that make my being. Or was it Andrew’s being? Something jumps orbit and enters my shell. There is something uncanny in the imagery of someone lying in the shadows of “tangled light/ as under sleeping trees.” It is the poet but it could very well be me. Everything is so elementary here that there is a smooth flow of nascent identification. When the Babel of sound ceases it is the same silence that remains with everyone like “the continuance of a holy text” – any holy text. The trope of physics continues in the second stanza when the poet says, “We are dazzled matter.” Perhaps it is the dazzling that brings the stupefying silence that “spins in the shadows.” The speculations – “Waves, particles, hieroglyphs” – from the intangible to the hypothetical to the decipherable become “gliding night’s adornments.” The night, slipping by and yet not eliding from its grip all that has survived from primitive periods, fills like the impalpable air of memory the poet’s emptiness. The “rising light” and “emptiness filling” almost depict a convection current as if the Brownian motion of the “troublous quarks” in the first stanza has attained a cosmic pattern in the second stanza as love evolved. The trajectory of the poem traces a curve that brings within its loop the spinning subatomic particles as well as the spinning cosmos. This is love in its everlasting, primeval, pure state. Who will not identify with it in this poem? This is not only the poet’s poem; this is the reader’s too. (A New Earth) With heavily hanging leaves and open-handed fronds, the little path through your flower garden hides, in its unexpected turns, a new earth. It's there sounding in bird song, making a restless peace for itself in the living air. Shall we enter and grace that radiance with human arms? Let's wait at the inward door to those fields of light. To find our way we must first be lost. Whatever empties there refills. The moment of discovery has in its essence both the element of euphoria and a contradictory element of relaxation. Especially if the place discovered has been hidden by “heavily hanging leaves,” “open-handed fronds” and a shrouded garden path of “unexpected turns” then that moment of discovery is a moment of paradox. This “new earth” is a place where the bird song has a “restless peace.” It is this sound that makes the air living. It is thereby a discovery of life. It is also a moment of hesitation where you question yourself as if you have apprehended your own self as an intruder – “Shall we enter…?” The new earth is no longer a space it is a moment in time, a “radiance,” the incorporeal that you have qualms at touching with “human arms.” So you decide to wait. Now vice-versa, time yields to place and waiting begets “the inward door/ to those fields of light.” The conundrum of first getting lost in order to find the way and experience that moment of discovery where paradoxes meet, where contradictions emanate from each other and yet co-exist, and where relationships unearth new meanings, this new earth is perhaps self-realization. In this new earth whatever empties gets refilled, whatever is lost is found, whatever is not understood understood. Perhaps it is love for love too reconciles opposites and hence it is also grace, radiance, and a hint of perpetuity, infinity, and eternity. Andrew Bellon’s poem gives us a glimpse of something that is inside us and yet is elusive. It needs to be discovered and waited upon at that “inward door” to experience the “fields of light” that the soul bestows on us.

- Amit Shankar Saha