On Translation: a Poem

Of late I have been thinking a lot about the process of translation. And this morning as I deliberated more and more on the topic, this particular poem came to my mind.

On Translation: a poem

It feels like the warmth of May—

the page of roses with their beaming soul,

their thorns being ideas frozen in time,

like barefaced thin rods sticking out of unbaked buildings.

Their sepia-tinted eyes with pupils dilated

stare at me with unbecoming haste,

inviting me with their animated glance

to savor the mirage those frozen ideas create.

I see the wonder-worker work in haste

and tear away the page into defaced strips.

He then gathers the bits on his palm

and lets the east-wind have its way.

                          Away they fly like chirruping birds                                                                                                 

cloistered till now in some rusty cage

of stagnant time, living and feeding

from a painted trough with seeds

for alphabets and letters language bound.

I walk away from his shadowy form and behold

the constellation of dried paper animating

the sky of my local hemisphere.

Their myriad hues, their bewitching charm

weave tenebrous waves on the vault abaft.

And there I stand under this illuminated map

of tessellated paper with foreign letters,

imbibing the Pierian tune of re-creation

now in  my native tongue.

Many of the red petals fall on the grounds,

and some are stamped on by the populace.

But as I walk away, I perceive those same sepia-tinted eyes

half-smiling at me from the  renewed spectral-shape. 

Blogging from A-Z: Z for Zilch

Z for Zilch

Image from the web

Everything that starts must come to an end, everything that begins shall encounter a finale. We start our journey full with aspirations and desires and then enter the hemisphere of zilch, the ending, the nothingness. Nevertheless, the aftertaste of fatigue and exhaustion of our journey is often accompanied by a feeling of bliss and satisfaction that generally qualifies the ending.

 In the middle of the nil of the null and the void of the virtual world, we have been exploring our creative talents for a period of thirty days. Here, for the last month, we have been posting our daily compositions of a myriad nature thereby proving that even virtual zilch is not devoid of merit and emotion. Our journey together testifies to the fact that despite the strictures of form and aspect we have been taught to attribute to any writing activity of a formal, and even in many cases informal, writing, the proper usages we must remember, the clichés we must never use, we ultimately learn that what matters is the development of one’s own style, one’s own comfort zone within oneself as one writes and nothing else. This is the truth that I gathered from my month long activity of writing from A-Z.

 Over the month, I have read blog posts on fictional characters and books, on herbs and cooking, on philosophy and daily ruminations, and they not only proved to me that all it matters is the task of putting pen to paper or more exactly, typing words and letters in a virtual papyrus, but also that in most cases, all it needs to begin a writing activity is as simple a prompt as a word beginning with one particular letter or the other.  I am at awe with the immense capability of the human mind, the talents it possesses, and its intrinsic philosophy only ready to pour down with a tilt of the beaker that sustains it. One letter, one simple letter led each of us to consider so many things: places, characters in novels, recipes, décor, etc, and still we are not satiated. The jorum still holds more ideas that will bloom in the course of the future life.

I stand under the hallowed portals of nothingness with a mind not empty, but rather full to the brim with happy experiences of writing. I agree I have taken a lot of liberties with the creative challenge of blogging from the first to the last letter of the English alphabetical series, but in the end as I check the posts submitted and posted in my blogger page, I am satisfied. I indeed have written on each and every letter, and in the process have discovered a fresh knack for writing poetry again. The escapades into the past also offered me immense satisfaction and joy as well the suspense of thinking about a word/idea to write daily. 

 I know that even though we are not to type any post tomorrow, that we will have zilch at hand tomorrow concerning this writing challenge, I will find myself happily dwelling on the fulsome experience I gathered from my own writing and from the others’ I read.  In the zilch and negativity of the world, tonight I wish to depart with a happy note of a fulsome tomorrow.

Blogging from A-Z Challenge: Y for Yesterday, a poem

Yesterday

Image from the web

Yesterday you needed a word to create dreams,

those golden reveries of mountainous aspirations

covering any distance, any terrain

without difficulty.

Yesterday you could start anywhere,

unawares, unwary, and let yourself

forget your destination, and enjoy

the going.

Today you feel the need to look back at the silent desert

Of memory, and brush the smeared faces of uncouth

peccadilloes white.

Today you wish to crush the beans and berries

under your hobnailed feet and forget those words,

those sights and breaths that remind you

Of yesterday.

Yesterday you were born to the warmth

of a cradle song, to the cries of wonder

and love for your downy, blotchy form,

Yesterday you listened to the fire of youth,

you imagined the sun and the earth as your legal legacy.

Remember the ten little green globules at hand, and the

one in the sky, white and freckled and often eaten away by a monster?

Today they strike you as dark, the white globule, the white star,

you smell their green-white and imbibe stale yellow.

Today as you tell yourself the story of scattered eyes and

lamb-flock like dreams dropping from a blue, blue sky,

you ignore the loud bird-noises and tell yourself

           you were afraid of the sunless dark that blanketed 

yesterday. 

X for X

As I sit composing my blog-post on the letter X, I cannot help but pity the poor fellow jostled in such an un-strategic position among heavyweights like W and Y. How many times do we think of this letter X in our daily social exchanges? Come to think of it, the situation of the poor letter X is like that of the diminutive status of the planet Pluto; we hardly consider it as important for our communicative exchanges. Every time X appears it is preceded by some other letter, or if it appears anywhere unaccompanied by other letters in the alphabet, it signifies our wrongs, our mistakes (remember those red crosses on our answer scripts we used to dread; they still freak me out though) and danger (a skeletal head and two grayish long bones forming a letter X). Even in Xmas, the letter X reminds us of the cross of crucifixion that killed Christ the savior.

X can probably be adulated for its symmetry, but I wonder if we can ever elevate its status and reestablish X as a neutral letter that doesn’t bring to mind the erroneous escapades of our career.

W for writing

W for Writing

The following week we will be heading toward the closure of the fantastic writing tour we have been participating in. My feeling of satisfaction at being a participant (albeit the liberties I took) in this awesome writing trip wafts from my mind like misty sheets of smog abaft pine-embedded hills. My intimidations about the writing exercise persists, but like a injured child who wouldn’t jettison her favorite game despite the injury she received while playing, I too wouldn’t dream of defenestrating my writing in spite of all my mental tribulations concerning my prowess in that art that I experience periodically. I have realized overtime that it is the only, and I say only, activity that when performed gives me the most pleasure; and I am sure many of my creative compatriots too will feel the same way about the lovely activity of writing that unites us all in this virtual world.

Tonight I raise my glass to the fabulous art of pen-pushing, the activity that unites the mind and the body, that gives us so much joy that we feel not only pleased and refreshed by it but start to consider the goodness in the world, Surely, we must dwell on the negatives as well, but I always believe that writing enthusiasts are happy persons at heart. So, to writing it is that we cheer with the hope that we all get better in the art of translating mental images and impressions on paper and continue to enjoy the daily joys of each others’ lives through our writing samples.