Arundhaty chose a prize-winning poem by Marilyn K Walker called The Clothesline, lamenting the obsolescence of that humble backyard device which allowed neighbourly information to be passed on unwittingly:
When neighbors knew each other best
By what hung on the line!
Marilyn K. Walker – The Clothesline cover
Devika featured one of India’s best known poets, Keki Daruwalla, who died recently in Delhi on Sept 24. You may read his obituary here. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1987 and the Padma Shri – the highest civilian honour – in 2014. His poem on Migrations conveys the deep anguish of things left behind, including precious memories, when people are uprooted, as his family was from Lahore where he was born in 1937.
Somebody said cats are the only animals that look down on humans. Geetha’s poem by Vikram Seth concerns a cat endearingly observed with its patronising actions recorded; it takes full advantage of the narrator to avail of goodies:
He is permitted food and I
The furred indulgence of a side.
Vikram Seth – Spoiled Cat
Joe thought the time was ripe to hear from poet Thien, when dissents across the world are being put down in societies as varied as USA, UK, Russia, and Germany. In India too a series of speech cancellations of well-known scholars in the name of conformity, has given rise to censorship. The Vietnamese poet Nguyen Chi Thien was willing to suffer years of imprisonment for exercising his right to speak freely. Why are poets so feared by mighty governments?
Kavita presented Philip Larkin in a much-anthologised dark poem which negates the joys of expectations with which lovers wait and gamblers hesitate. Contradicting the proverb All things come to those who wait, the golden future never arrives, but what is certain to come is that one black ship (of death) towing
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
Philip Larkin with his Rolleiflex camera, 1957
Philip Larkin, England’s laureate of despair, is ironically observing the absurdity of society and culture, and thinking that all expectation will turn cold, which runs counter to WS who has Helena say in All’s Well That Ends Well:
Oft expectation fails and most oft there
Where most it promises, and oft it hits
Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.
Emily Dickinson, the monastic poet of Amherst has been a great favourite at KRG. Joe once wrote about a visit he and KumKum paid to her haunts. That blog post has exhaustive biographical material as well, including the online digital availability of her work from Harvard University in collaboration with other institutions. She began a famous poem of hers (#1263):
Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Here KumKum presented a second one (#320) where the poet writes:
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons:
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
Priya’s poem Shades of Anger by the Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah was very relevant to the contemporary woes that beset her people whose homes are being destroyed and people killed by American-made 2000-pound bombs that continue to be delivered on demand to Israel in order to reduce Gaza to rubble:
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
And did you hear my sister screaming yesterday
as she gave birth at a check point
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter afternoons:
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
Priya’s poem Shades of Anger by the Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah was very relevant to the contemporary woes that beset her people whose homes are being destroyed and people killed by American-made 2000-pound bombs that continue to be delivered on demand to Israel in order to reduce Gaza to rubble:
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
And did you hear my sister screaming yesterday
as she gave birth at a check point
…
Yes my liberators are here to kill my children
and call them “collateral damage”
Saras took up the master poet W.H. Auden whose first submission to Faber & Faber was rejected by T.S. Eliot (who was its Director) in 1927 only to have Auden’s first collection Poems published by the same firm in 1930. The poem Funeral Blues was recited in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) by Matthew (played by actor John Hannah) who is mourning the death of his partner Gareth, a much older man played by Simon Callow:
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
Shoba recited two wonderful poems by Elizabeth Jennings, who was popular with the general reader for writing about the things that preoccupy most readers – family, faith, love, loss, illness, hope, atonement, redemption. Her Catholic faith comes through and animates her poems. Of the self-portraits by Rembrandt in old age she writes:
Self-portraits understand
And old age can divest,
With truthful changes, us of fear of death.
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond.
Our last poet was Rudyard Kipling whose most famous poem is Gunga Din in which he exalts the compassionate role of a bhisti in the army at the battlefront. Zakia chose If—, a poem that is almost mandated in middle schools in India for elocution contests.
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
…
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
When all these conditions are fulfilled Kipling assures us your manhood is guaranteed. Kipling wrote this poem as a piece of advice to his dear son, John Kipling, on how to navigate life with integrity and character. He was killed in World War I at the age of eighteen during the Battle of Loos on September 27, 1915.
Marilyn K. Walker (1930 – 2020)
An award-winning poet, Marilyn K. Walker authored five books of poetry and was published regularly in anthologies and national magazines. Over the years, Marilyn received numerous national awards for her poetry. Her poem, The Clothesline, was selected as the Grand Prize winner at the 1996 International Society of Poets. She was also a finalist at the 1995 convention for her poem Maturity, for which she was awarded a book contract. Other notable national awards included: a Golden Poet Award at the World of Poetry Convention; two Editor’s Choice Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the National Library of Poetry; and two Diamond Trophy Awards from the Famous Poets Society.
Marilyn K. Walker – the poet celebrating her ninetieth birthday
Marilyn K. Walker, 90, was the daughter of the late Harold M. Kamp and Nettie E. Longendyke. Marilyn was predeceased by her husband of nearly 62 years, Charles E. (Chuck) Walker in 2012; her daughter-in-law, Lucie M. Walker in 2010; and her sister, Dorothy Mae Kamp, in 1930. Marilyn was very involved in her community, Saugerties, NY. Marilyn was also a Deacon Emeritus of the First Congregational Church where she was a member for more than 78 years. Prior to her husband’s passing, Marilyn and Chuck had the good fortune to spend their winters at their second home in Palm Springs, Calif. They also traveled extensively, visiting all 50 states, 10 Canadian Provinces, 7 countries in Europe, as well as vacations to Mexico City and Acapulco.
Vikram Seth (born 1952)
Geetha chose a short and quaint poem, The Stray Cat, by Vikram Seth; she dedicated her reading to the cat lovers among the reader's children, Kumkum and Joe's son, Reuben, Saras' daughter Meera; and Thomo and her son Rahul, who lost his beloved cat Franco some months ago.
Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta on 20th June, 1952. His father, Prem Seth, came to newly partitioned India from West Punjab, now in Pakistan, and settled in Delhi where he worked as an executive in the Bata Shoe company. His mother, Leila Seth, was the first woman judge on the Delhi High Court, and the first woman Chief Justice of a state high court.
Seth was educated at a succession of far flung locales, among them, Doon School, St.Xaviers High School, St. Michael's High School, Welham's Boys School; Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Trinity College, Cambridge, Stanford University, California, USA, Nanjing University, China.
He is the author of a number of books in various genres including novels like A Suitable Boy, a novel-in-verse – The Golden Gate, and a memoir.
Vikram Seth is now 72
Despite his many books of prose, he is in essence a poet whose use of fixed form is belied by a tone that is conversational and seemingly casual. There is playfulness and gravitas, frequent use of the first person, skilful handling of mood and narrative, and a profound weariness with the self. He writes:
And there is an ambivalence: the poems are both intimate and distancing, as if they would keep the reader at arm's length and draw him/ her in at the same time. Vikram lives in New Delhi and London.
[This is excerpted from The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil]
Seth is the recipient of numerous awards, some of which are Sahitya Akademi Award, a Guggenheim fellowship for Creative Arts, W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Thien is an example of a dissident poet who did not fall in line with those who tried to censor his freedom of speech. We need this quality sorely in all countries, to safeguard the ability to speak without fear. It’s happening in all societies, e.g., now students who speak up on college campuses for the Palestinians who are suffering in Gaza are being punished even in so-called liberal places like Harvard University. In India we have seen eminent historians like Ramachandran Guha being disinvited from speaking at IIT-Bombay and he decided to speak on the history of Indian environmental debates. (Feb 2024).
Achin Vanaik, a retired professor of political science and international relations, who was invited as guest lecturer on Palestine issues hosted by the institute’s humanities and social sciences department in November 2023, was also disinvited.
Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Services (TISS) instituted a new “honour code” for master’s students on 19 August 2024, requiring them to sign a pledge to “refrain from engaging in political, anti-establishment or unpatriotic discussions.”
In July 2018, the JNU administration issued show-cause notices to 48 professors for participating in a protest against the vice-chancellor’s policies. The notices invoked the union government’s Central Civil Services conduct rules, prohibiting government servants from making anti-government statements or joining political associations.
The Economist magazine reports in Thien’s obituary published in Oct 13th 2012 (https://www.economist.com/obituary/2012/10/13/nguyen-chi-thien):
“He ran through the gate of the British embassy in Hanoi, past the guard, with 400 poems under his shirt, demanding to see the ambassador. The guard couldn’t stop him. In the reception area, a few Vietnamese were sitting at a table. He fought them off, and crashed the table over. … The noise brought three Englishmen out, and he thrust his sheaf of poems at one of them. Then, calm again, he let himself be arrested at the gate” … and was taken to Hoa Lo - the well known ‘Hanoi Hilton’ Prison, where he spent six years in prison, often in solitary confinement.
During this time, his collection of vivid poems, known as Hoa Dia-Nguc which he had delivered to the British Embassy, began to circulate in Vietnamese editions, and eventually overseas. Some of the poems were set to music and popularised by Vietnamese folksinger, Pham Duy. In 1984, a bilingual edition of the poems, translated into English by Vietnamese literary scholar Huynh Sanh Thong, was published under the title Flowers from Hell by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University. In 1985, while it was still unknown if he were alive or dead, Thien was awarded the International Poetry Prize in Rotterdam in absentia on the basis of this book. He was released from prison in 1991 and lived in Hanoi until 1995; then he emigrated to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 2004.
Nguyen Chi Thien, dissident poet
He was not strong physically. He contracted TB as a boy; his parents had to sell their house to pay for his antibiotics. Then since 1960, on various pretexts—contesting the regime’s view of history, writing “irreverent” poetry—he had done several long spells in prison and labour camp. Hard rice and salt water had made him scrawny and thin-haired by his 40s. Internally, though, he was like steel: mind, heart, soul. Sheer determination had forced him through the British embassy that day. In fact, the more the regime hurt him, the more he thrived:
They exiled me to the heart of the jungle
Wishing to fertilise the manioc with my remains
I turned into an expert hunter
And came out full of snake wisdom and rhino fierceness.
They sank me in the ocean
Wishing that I would remain in the depths
I became a deep sea diver
And came up covered with scintillating pearls.
The pearls were his poems. He kept his early efforts in a table-drawer where he found them later. In prison he was allowed no pen, paper or books. He therefore memorised each one of his hundreds of poems in the quiet of the night, carefully revised it for several days, and mentally filed it away.
Walking out to till the fields with his fellow prisoners, many of them poets too, he would recite his poems to them and they would respond with theirs. After 1979 he spent the best part of eight years in solitary, in stocks or shackles in the dark. His poems became sobs, wheezes, bloody tubercular coughs. But in his mind he still set out fishing, and watched dawn overtake the stars. He sniffed the jasmine and hot noodle soup on a night street in Hanoi. He remembered his sister Hao teaching him French at six—what a paradise the French occupation seemed, in retrospect!—and went swashbuckling again with d’Artagnan and his crew. That way, he kept alive.
A favourite mental companion in prison was Li Bai, the great poet of eighth-century China. In his mind he would sup wine with him from amber cups, loll on chaises longues, watch pretty maidens weaving silk under the willow trees and the peach blossoms falling. He would talk to the moon with him and get wildly, romantically drunk. There was a flavour here of his own careless youth, his teahouse years of girls and smoking. Both he and Li Bai had offended the emperor, mocked the education system, and been punished. But somehow the oppressions of the distant past seemed bearable. Not so the acts of Vietnam’s red demons, with their nauseating loudspeaker jingles about Happiness and Light.
In 1995 he managed to get shelter in America. He lived humbly in Little Saigon in Orange County, California, lodging with fellow countrymen. Green tea and smoking remained his chief comforts. He had nothing to share but his poems and his memories of fellow poets. That, and his hatred of the regime in his country, where his writings remained banned.
One of the cruelest of punishments is to put people in solitary confinement. There are prisoners in Britain, prisoners in America who are put into solitary confinement if they act defiantly in the prison system.
Joe said he wouldn't survive in solitary confinement and would commit suicide by bashing his head against the wall because it's the most inhuman thing to suffer, to put a person in solitary.
Look at Thien, thinking of his mother in prison. Of all the images that come to him, he thinks of his mother, endless tears flowing down her face onto her saffron dress, which he knew she wore when she prayed. And he thinks, yes, that's what she must be doing now for her wayward son. Thien merely had to kowtow to the people who beat him and everything would have been okay. But some people don't kowtow, which, by the way, is a Chinese word for the ceremony of touching the forehead to the ground as a gesture of deference
Geetha said when you visit the cellular jail in Andamans, what Joe said is driven home. Those who didn't kowtow and defied the British, got solitary cells.
Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985)
Kavita chose a poem by Philip Larkin, titled Next, please. Earlier she had presented a video on the poem Church Going read by Philip Larkin himself.
Philip Larkin is a post-modern poet. He was a contemporary of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. Along with Donald Davie and Elizabeth Jennings, Larkin is called a Movement poet. Movement poetry was a kind of a literary movement – it was not that they declared themselves to be Movement poets but there were a few poets who shared some common features and their poetry was a reaction to the poetry of writers like Pound and Eliot.
Larkin himself considered the poetry of these past masters as too cerebral and intellectual, and he felt that the kind of poetry they wrote actually drove away the English people from poetry. He felt that the good old poetry of the earlier kind was no longer in existence and he wanted to bring that back and all of the poets of the Movement shared this common interest. They wanted English poetry to revive its traditional simplicity and the commonsensical attitude – poetry should be straightforward. They wanted it to be simple instead of being cerebral and dense so that nobody could understand it without learned annotations. Larkin wanted poetry to be not exactly easy, but he wanted a kind of poetry that the common man could relate to.
Philip Larkin from a 1975 photo – he wrote four slender volumes of poetry
Larkin is never too emotional or over-sentimental. He always writes in a very matter-of-fact style about what he sees around him, about what happens to him and to others, so he gives us a very honest and a realistic picture of whatever he writes. This poem which is titled Next, please is a simple poem and when you read the poem you will understand just how he writes about things that we can easily relate to. The poem is a short one, six stanzas of four lines each.This is how the poem goes
(Kavita recites)
Okay so that's the poem he says that we are always too eager for the future. Who is this we? It is the poet and all of us the readers, human beings in general. We always pin great hopes and expectations on the future and we pick up bad habits of expectancy, always expecting and waiting for something to happen. For example, we expect that we will win the lottery, or that we’ll get a better job. or somebody will give us a gift – so we always keep hoping for better things. And often these are unfounded hopes; that indicates we are too eager for the future. We pick up the bad habits of expectancy. It is not actually clever to keep expecting that things will improve; we are not being realistic about life, we live in dreams.
Something is always approaching every day. When something does finally arrive we keep telling ourselves how slow they are in arriving:
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!
He gives us a picture of a person standing on a bluff watching and looking out into the sea, expecting a ship to come, and imagining a sparkling armada, an armada of promises.
Yet what happens finally the ships come but they don't stop they still leave us holding wretched stocks of flowers. Nothing happens and the flowers wither away and finally we are left holding wretched stalks, with no flowers at all or dried up flowers.
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
The final stanza completes the cycle of despair in waiting; what does come for us is death in the form of a ship.
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Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
KumKum chose to read two poems by Emily Dickinson, There's a Certain Slant of Light, and I was the Slightest in the House. Both were simple to understand but carry deep thoughts.
The first poem begins with a natural image ‘a certain slant of light’ on winter afternoons. This leads the narrator to a kind of religious reflection as she attempts to understand the strange feeling the sunbeam evokes and what its presence means. This light is not comforting – it has an oppressive, heavy quality, similar to the solemn, almost overwhelming feeling that exalted music in a a cathedral might evoke. The winter setting often symbolises a period of dormancy or emotional coldness, hinting that the speaker feels isolated or melancholic.
In the second stanza Dickinson introduces the idea of ‘Heavenly Hurt.’ This phrase suggests that the light brings a kind of emotional or spiritual wound, but unlike a physical wound, there is no visible mark. It only leaves an ‘internal difference’, a subtle but profound change in the soul, where deeper meanings lie hidden.
The poet states that this experience of despair is something that ‘none may teach’. It's a personal feeling and can't be shared or explained. Describing it as an ‘imperial affliction’ suggests it is both authoritative and unavoidable, as if despair is a command from nature itself, delivered through the indifferent ‘Air.’
In the final stanza, Dickinson personifies the landscape and shadows as if they, too, are affected by this slant of light.
The quiet that accompanies this light, with shadows that ‘hold their breath,’ suggests a moment of suspension or pause, where everything feels still and attentive and the light fades. The poet compares its absence, to a sense of profound distance and the feeling of separation that death represents.
The second poem, I was the slightest in the House captures Dickinson’s characteristic exploration of themes like self-perception, humility, and the subtle influence of an individual. The speaker's quiet, almost invisible role emphasises the idea that a life lived with humility and discretion could be meaningful. The poem also hints at the bittersweet nature of reflection, as time often reshapes our understanding of who we are and what our presence means.
In essence, Dickinson seems to be saying that even the ‘slightest’ among us has an impact, however small or quiet. The speaker’s life, though modest, is a part of the greater whole, suggesting that significance isn’t always tied to visibility or acclaim. Instead, Dickinson celebrates the power of small things—whispered moments, brief conversations, and lives that resonate quietly yet profoundly with grace.
Bio of the poet Emily Dickinson.
At KRG Emily Dickinson's poems have been read many times before. Hence, KumKum will not write a long biography here, but refer to what has already been documented before, for example in Joe’s recounting of a visit to Amherst in 2014.
Emily Dickinson is one of the most important poets of America. Throughout her life, Dickinson rarely left her home in Amherst, a small town in western Massachusetts. She lived in almost total isolation. Nevertheless, she kept contact with a few people. Emily Dickinson was greatly influenced by the Romantic poets of England. She liked the poetry of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the works of John Keats.
Emily Dickinson wrote a great number of poems during her lifetime. However, she wasn't a recognised poet in her lifetime, because very few of her poems were published during her lifetime. After her death, her family found about 1800 poems in forty hand-sewn fascicles in her wooden chest. These have now all been published and her works are available digitally from Harvard University.
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907 – 1973)
Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as Funeral Blues; on political and social themes, such as September 1, 1939 and The Shield of Achilles; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes, such as For the Time Being and Horae Canonicae.
Auden was born in York, England, and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family. He attended various English public schools and studied English at Christ Church College, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in 1928–29, he spent five years (1930–1935) teaching in British private preparatory schools. In 1939, he moved to the United States; he became an American citizen in 1946, while retaining his British citizenship. Auden taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s.
In the early 1930s W.H. Auden was acclaimed prematurely by some as the foremost poet then writing in English, on the disputable ground that his poetry was more relevant to contemporary social and political realities than that of T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, who previously had shared the summit. By the time of Eliot’s death in 1965, however, a convincing case could be made for the assertion that Auden was indeed Eliot’s successor, as Eliot had inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in 1939.
Auden as a poet, was far more copious and varied than Eliot and far more uneven. He tried to interpret the times, to diagnose the ills of society and deal with intellectual and moral problems of public concern. But the need to express the inner world of fantasy and dream was equally apparent, and, hence, the poetry is sometimes bewildering. If the poems, taken individually, are often obscure—especially the earlier ones—they create, when taken together, a meaningful poetic cosmos with symbolic landscapes and mythical characters and situations. In his later years Auden ordered the world of his poetry and made it easier of access; he collected his poems, revised them, and presented them chronologically in two volumes: Collected Shorter Poems 1927–57 (1967) and Collected Longer Poems (1969).
Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of book-length). His poetry was encyclopaedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.
He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood, and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, and worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s.
Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective. His rejected poems include Spain and September 1, 1939. His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it. (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)
Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001)
She was the only woman poet to join the Movement, an English group of poets dedicated to an anti-romantic aesthetic. Philip Larkin was also a member. She won the Cholmondeley award, Somerset Maugham award and the W.H Smith Literary award.
She published 26 books of poetry in her lifetime. She was a dedicated Roman Catholic. An important theme in Jenning’s poetry is art.
Visit to an artist, In a picture gallery, Works of art, Questions to other artists, Vision to an artist … are some of her other poems on the the theme of art.
The poem titled Rembrandt’s Late Self-portraits focuses on the honesty of the artist in painting himself as he was in old age. Rembrandt painted himself throughout his life. The first was done at 22 years of age. By then, he had moved to Amsterdam from Leiden, his home town. He became a successful and much sought-after artist. He bought a large house in this period. His house is preserved as the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam.
In his later years, he took up self portraits again, doing one a year.
You are confronted with yourself.Each year
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly
Your brush’s care runs with self- knowledge
In our discussion, we spoke of the artist truthfully recording the changes that are happening to him; it is an act of simple recording, devoid of pride, in no way self-glorifying. We discussed the self portraits of our times, namely, selfies taken with a smartphone camera. They are false because we take several and choose the one that flatters us on a given day.
There is the story of a young girl who fell to her death while taking a selfie in a dangerous position.
The other poem, The Painter, describes an artist painting a vase of roses near a window.
The roses and the lights collide
As he withdraws his shadow from the view.
The artist separates himself as his work is done. The art lives on, and the artist lives on in his work.
Bio of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), English Journalist, short story writer, poet and novelist
Rudyard Kipling, one of the best-known poets and storytellers of the late Victorian era, was both celebrated and controversial. Although he received the Nobel Prize in 1907, his pro-colonial and nationalist views made him unpopular among critics, who labeled him a colonialist and racist. Yet his literary contributions, particularly children’s classics like The Jungle Book, have remained culturally significant.
Born in India in 1865 to parents immersed in art, Kipling spent his early childhood there, but was later sent to England for schooling, enduring a harsh period of bullying and loneliness. This difficult childhood and later schooling experiences deeply impacted him. In his early career as a journalist in India, Kipling gained popularity with his poems and stories, capturing both the local colour and British imperial life.
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Rudyard Kipling, English journalist, short story writer, poet and novelist
After returning to England in 1889, Kipling quickly became a literary sensation. He eventually married and lived in Vermont, USA, for a time, where he wrote The Jungle Books — the cornerstone of his reputation as a children’s author. His works for children often drew inspiration from Indian folklore and Buddhist Jataka tales.
After moving back to England, Kipling settled in Sussex, where he wrote Just So Stories and Puck of Pook’s Hill, inspired by English history and local artifacts. Though he was once a beloved public figure, his support for British imperialism and militaristic views contributed to his growing isolation. In his later years, he was appointed literary advisor to the Imperial War Graves Commission but became increasingly disillusioned and reclusive, especially after the death of his son, John, in World War I. Kipling’s letters, preserved across three volumes, reveal a complex figure: a devoted family man and British loyalist who struggled with contradictions and held deep ambivalence about his own identity and views. He died in 1936, leaving behind a complicated legacy shaped by both literary brilliance and divisive opinions.
This is taken from the Poetry Foundation’s site, summarised by ChatGPT:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rudyard-kipling
Zakia recited Kipling’s poem If— which constitutes a father’s advice to his son on how to live a resilient and praiseworthy life. The speaker outlines the qualities of patience, self-confidence, and honesty while urging his son to stay calm amid chaos and not to respond to hate or lies with the same negativity. He emphasises a balanced approach to ambition and setbacks, suggesting that dreams and successes should not control one’s life. The speaker further advises taking risks, enduring losses without complaint, and persevering even when exhausted. The poem concludes by highlighting the importance of filling every moment with purpose. If his son can master these qualities, he will achieve a fulfilling and successful life, symbolised by “being a man.”
Yes my liberators are here to kill my children
and call them “collateral damage”
Saras took up the master poet W.H. Auden whose first submission to Faber & Faber was rejected by T.S. Eliot (who was its Director) in 1927 only to have Auden’s first collection Poems published by the same firm in 1930. The poem Funeral Blues was recited in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) by Matthew (played by actor John Hannah) who is mourning the death of his partner Gareth, a much older man played by Simon Callow:
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and Sunday rest,
Shoba recited two wonderful poems by Elizabeth Jennings, who was popular with the general reader for writing about the things that preoccupy most readers – family, faith, love, loss, illness, hope, atonement, redemption. Her Catholic faith comes through and animates her poems. Of the self-portraits by Rembrandt in old age she writes:
Self-portraits understand
And old age can divest,
With truthful changes, us of fear of death.
Rembrandt self-portrait 1659 from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond.
Our last poet was Rudyard Kipling whose most famous poem is Gunga Din in which he exalts the compassionate role of a bhisti in the army at the battlefront. Zakia chose If—, a poem that is almost mandated in middle schools in India for elocution contests.
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
…
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
When all these conditions are fulfilled Kipling assures us your manhood is guaranteed. Kipling wrote this poem as a piece of advice to his dear son, John Kipling, on how to navigate life with integrity and character. He was killed in World War I at the age of eighteen during the Battle of Loos on September 27, 1915.
Arundhathy
An award-winning poet, Marilyn K. Walker authored five books of poetry and was published regularly in anthologies and national magazines. Over the years, Marilyn received numerous national awards for her poetry. Her poem, The Clothesline, was selected as the Grand Prize winner at the 1996 International Society of Poets. She was also a finalist at the 1995 convention for her poem Maturity, for which she was awarded a book contract. Other notable national awards included: a Golden Poet Award at the World of Poetry Convention; two Editor’s Choice Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry by the National Library of Poetry; and two Diamond Trophy Awards from the Famous Poets Society.
Marilyn K. Walker – the poet celebrating her ninetieth birthday
The poet says a family's clothesline let neighbours know the way you lived and it revealed the composition of the family and the styles they observed:
A clothes line was a news forecast
To neighbors passing by.
There were no secrets you could keep
When clothes were hung to dry.
Marilyn K. Walker, 90, was the daughter of the late Harold M. Kamp and Nettie E. Longendyke. Marilyn was predeceased by her husband of nearly 62 years, Charles E. (Chuck) Walker in 2012; her daughter-in-law, Lucie M. Walker in 2010; and her sister, Dorothy Mae Kamp, in 1930. Marilyn was very involved in her community, Saugerties, NY. Marilyn was also a Deacon Emeritus of the First Congregational Church where she was a member for more than 78 years. Prior to her husband’s passing, Marilyn and Chuck had the good fortune to spend their winters at their second home in Palm Springs, Calif. They also traveled extensively, visiting all 50 states, 10 Canadian Provinces, 7 countries in Europe, as well as vacations to Mexico City and Acapulco.
Devika
Keki N Daruwalla (1937 – 2024)
When Devika was casting about for a poet, she came across the death announcement of the poet Keki Daruwalla on Sep 26, 2024, and decided he should be remembered. The Hindu newspaper ran an article by Namita Gokhale on the literary legacy of Keki N. Daruwalla. Ms Gokahale writes: “Keki Daruwalla’s prose, his novels and short stories, were as important to his writing as the poetry. His understanding of structure, his deceptively simple style, his grasp of society and the larger polity, give the novels a vast scope of reference and document the recent history of India and the region. … He stayed young through his engagement and interaction with a new generation of poets. He was generous in giving introductions and blurbs for their publications. The human legacy he leaves behind is the kindness, affection and belief he imparted to aspiring writers.”
Keki Daruwalla, poet and police officer
Keki Daruwalla knew the weight and value of words, and used them carefully and consistently, leaving behind a literary legacy that spanned 15 collections of poetry and 10 works of short and long fiction. His poetry and prose had a range and clarity of vision, with an underlying world view and belief system that was robust yet deeply philosophical.
His Parsi background combined with a deep knowledge of India made him truly a citizen of the world, a cosmopolitan. He was a member of the National Commission for Minorities.
Keki Nasserwanji Daruwalla was born in Lahore to a Parsi family on 24 January 1937. His father, N.C. Daruwalla, was an eminent professor, who taught in Government College Lahore. Before the Partition his family left undivided India in 1945 and moved to Junagarh and then to Rampur in India. As a result, he grew up studying in various schools and in various languages.
He obtained his master's degree in English Literature from Government College, Ludhiana, University of Punjab, and then spent a year at Oxford as a Queen Elizabeth House Fellow in 1980–81.
He joined the Indian Police Service (IPS) in 1958. Working as a police officer offered him various opportunities to work in different parts of the country. He witnessed the harsh realities of life from which he drew the material for his literary pursuits. He wrote twelve books, and his first novel, For Pepper & Christ, was published in 2009. He received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for his collection of poems Landscape in 1987.
He also won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1984, which he returned in October 2015 to protest the Akademi's failure “to speak out against ideological collectives that have used physical violence against authors.”
While pursuing his craft of writing, Daruwalla served an illustrious career in the IPS, rising to become Special assistant to the Prime Minister on International Affairs during Mr Charan Singh’s short stint of 3 months as PM in 1979. Daruwalla subsequently served in the Cabinet Secretariat until his retirement. Even though he led a successful career in police and later at the Research and Intelligence Wing (RAW), it was his literary acumen that gained him national and international repute.
Daruwalla died from pneumonia on 26 September 2024, at the age of 87. Daruwalla is survived by two daughters, Anaheita and Rookvain, sons-in-law and four grandchildren. His wife, Khurshid, pre-deceased him.
References:
In the poem Migrations Daruwalla alludes to the twin difficulties of having to leave one's accustomed home and be displaced to a different land; and of having to remember the people and faces from the past, now long gone. Perhaps the stangers who now occupy your home politely welcome you, but can oen even remmber the faces of one's grandmother who lived there?
In the poem Prayer, there is yearning for
... water remain water and not turn to blood
as it will if old grudges are nursed and
... the harsh dreams of our times devour us,...
Geetha
Geetha chose a short and quaint poem, The Stray Cat, by Vikram Seth; she dedicated her reading to the cat lovers among the reader's children, Kumkum and Joe's son, Reuben, Saras' daughter Meera; and Thomo and her son Rahul, who lost his beloved cat Franco some months ago.
Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta on 20th June, 1952. His father, Prem Seth, came to newly partitioned India from West Punjab, now in Pakistan, and settled in Delhi where he worked as an executive in the Bata Shoe company. His mother, Leila Seth, was the first woman judge on the Delhi High Court, and the first woman Chief Justice of a state high court.
Seth was educated at a succession of far flung locales, among them, Doon School, St.Xaviers High School, St. Michael's High School, Welham's Boys School; Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Trinity College, Cambridge, Stanford University, California, USA, Nanjing University, China.
He is the author of a number of books in various genres including novels like A Suitable Boy, a novel-in-verse – The Golden Gate, and a memoir.
Vikram Seth is now 72
Despite his many books of prose, he is in essence a poet whose use of fixed form is belied by a tone that is conversational and seemingly casual. There is playfulness and gravitas, frequent use of the first person, skilful handling of mood and narrative, and a profound weariness with the self. He writes:
The fact is this work is as dreary as shit.
I do not like it a bit.'
And there is an ambivalence: the poems are both intimate and distancing, as if they would keep the reader at arm's length and draw him/ her in at the same time. Vikram lives in New Delhi and London.
[This is excerpted from The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, edited by Jeet Thayil]
Seth is the recipient of numerous awards, some of which are Sahitya Akademi Award, a Guggenheim fellowship for Creative Arts, W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
The tenuous relationship between the stray cat and his own well-meaning desire to befriend it is revealed in this stanza:
But now he turns his topaz eyes
Upon my eyes, which must reveal
The private pressures of these days,
The numb anxieties I feel.
In exchange for food the poet-narrator is merely allowed
The furred indulgence of a side.
Joe
Nguyen Chi Thien (1939–2012) composed hundreds of poems during the years he spent as a political prisoner of the Communist regime in Vietnam labor camps from 1960 to 1977. The reason I thought it right to recite from a dissident poet is because we are seeing a period in which those who have views at variance with the official views are being cancelled and silenced.
Thien is an example of a dissident poet who did not fall in line with those who tried to censor his freedom of speech. We need this quality sorely in all countries, to safeguard the ability to speak without fear. It’s happening in all societies, e.g., now students who speak up on college campuses for the Palestinians who are suffering in Gaza are being punished even in so-called liberal places like Harvard University. In India we have seen eminent historians like Ramachandran Guha being disinvited from speaking at IIT-Bombay and he decided to speak on the history of Indian environmental debates. (Feb 2024).
Achin Vanaik, a retired professor of political science and international relations, who was invited as guest lecturer on Palestine issues hosted by the institute’s humanities and social sciences department in November 2023, was also disinvited.
Mumbai’s Tata Institute of Social Services (TISS) instituted a new “honour code” for master’s students on 19 August 2024, requiring them to sign a pledge to “refrain from engaging in political, anti-establishment or unpatriotic discussions.”
In July 2018, the JNU administration issued show-cause notices to 48 professors for participating in a protest against the vice-chancellor’s policies. The notices invoked the union government’s Central Civil Services conduct rules, prohibiting government servants from making anti-government statements or joining political associations.
The Economist magazine reports in Thien’s obituary published in Oct 13th 2012 (https://www.economist.com/obituary/2012/10/13/nguyen-chi-thien):
“He ran through the gate of the British embassy in Hanoi, past the guard, with 400 poems under his shirt, demanding to see the ambassador. The guard couldn’t stop him. In the reception area, a few Vietnamese were sitting at a table. He fought them off, and crashed the table over. … The noise brought three Englishmen out, and he thrust his sheaf of poems at one of them. Then, calm again, he let himself be arrested at the gate” … and was taken to Hoa Lo - the well known ‘Hanoi Hilton’ Prison, where he spent six years in prison, often in solitary confinement.
During this time, his collection of vivid poems, known as Hoa Dia-Nguc which he had delivered to the British Embassy, began to circulate in Vietnamese editions, and eventually overseas. Some of the poems were set to music and popularised by Vietnamese folksinger, Pham Duy. In 1984, a bilingual edition of the poems, translated into English by Vietnamese literary scholar Huynh Sanh Thong, was published under the title Flowers from Hell by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University. In 1985, while it was still unknown if he were alive or dead, Thien was awarded the International Poetry Prize in Rotterdam in absentia on the basis of this book. He was released from prison in 1991 and lived in Hanoi until 1995; then he emigrated to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 2004.
Nguyen Chi Thien, dissident poet
He was not strong physically. He contracted TB as a boy; his parents had to sell their house to pay for his antibiotics. Then since 1960, on various pretexts—contesting the regime’s view of history, writing “irreverent” poetry—he had done several long spells in prison and labour camp. Hard rice and salt water had made him scrawny and thin-haired by his 40s. Internally, though, he was like steel: mind, heart, soul. Sheer determination had forced him through the British embassy that day. In fact, the more the regime hurt him, the more he thrived:
They exiled me to the heart of the jungle
Wishing to fertilise the manioc with my remains
I turned into an expert hunter
And came out full of snake wisdom and rhino fierceness.
They sank me in the ocean
Wishing that I would remain in the depths
I became a deep sea diver
And came up covered with scintillating pearls.
The pearls were his poems. He kept his early efforts in a table-drawer where he found them later. In prison he was allowed no pen, paper or books. He therefore memorised each one of his hundreds of poems in the quiet of the night, carefully revised it for several days, and mentally filed it away.
Walking out to till the fields with his fellow prisoners, many of them poets too, he would recite his poems to them and they would respond with theirs. After 1979 he spent the best part of eight years in solitary, in stocks or shackles in the dark. His poems became sobs, wheezes, bloody tubercular coughs. But in his mind he still set out fishing, and watched dawn overtake the stars. He sniffed the jasmine and hot noodle soup on a night street in Hanoi. He remembered his sister Hao teaching him French at six—what a paradise the French occupation seemed, in retrospect!—and went swashbuckling again with d’Artagnan and his crew. That way, he kept alive.
A favourite mental companion in prison was Li Bai, the great poet of eighth-century China. In his mind he would sup wine with him from amber cups, loll on chaises longues, watch pretty maidens weaving silk under the willow trees and the peach blossoms falling. He would talk to the moon with him and get wildly, romantically drunk. There was a flavour here of his own careless youth, his teahouse years of girls and smoking. Both he and Li Bai had offended the emperor, mocked the education system, and been punished. But somehow the oppressions of the distant past seemed bearable. Not so the acts of Vietnam’s red demons, with their nauseating loudspeaker jingles about Happiness and Light.
In 1995 he managed to get shelter in America. He lived humbly in Little Saigon in Orange County, California, lodging with fellow countrymen. Green tea and smoking remained his chief comforts. He had nothing to share but his poems and his memories of fellow poets. That, and his hatred of the regime in his country, where his writings remained banned.
One of the cruelest of punishments is to put people in solitary confinement. There are prisoners in Britain, prisoners in America who are put into solitary confinement if they act defiantly in the prison system.
Joe said he wouldn't survive in solitary confinement and would commit suicide by bashing his head against the wall because it's the most inhuman thing to suffer, to put a person in solitary.
Look at Thien, thinking of his mother in prison. Of all the images that come to him, he thinks of his mother, endless tears flowing down her face onto her saffron dress, which he knew she wore when she prayed. And he thinks, yes, that's what she must be doing now for her wayward son. Thien merely had to kowtow to the people who beat him and everything would have been okay. But some people don't kowtow, which, by the way, is a Chinese word for the ceremony of touching the forehead to the ground as a gesture of deference
Geetha said when you visit the cellular jail in Andamans, what Joe said is driven home. Those who didn't kowtow and defied the British, got solitary cells.
Kavita
Kavita chose a poem by Philip Larkin, titled Next, please. Earlier she had presented a video on the poem Church Going read by Philip Larkin himself.
Philip Larkin is a post-modern poet. He was a contemporary of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. Along with Donald Davie and Elizabeth Jennings, Larkin is called a Movement poet. Movement poetry was a kind of a literary movement – it was not that they declared themselves to be Movement poets but there were a few poets who shared some common features and their poetry was a reaction to the poetry of writers like Pound and Eliot.
Larkin himself considered the poetry of these past masters as too cerebral and intellectual, and he felt that the kind of poetry they wrote actually drove away the English people from poetry. He felt that the good old poetry of the earlier kind was no longer in existence and he wanted to bring that back and all of the poets of the Movement shared this common interest. They wanted English poetry to revive its traditional simplicity and the commonsensical attitude – poetry should be straightforward. They wanted it to be simple instead of being cerebral and dense so that nobody could understand it without learned annotations. Larkin wanted poetry to be not exactly easy, but he wanted a kind of poetry that the common man could relate to.
Philip Larkin from a 1975 photo – he wrote four slender volumes of poetry
Larkin is never too emotional or over-sentimental. He always writes in a very matter-of-fact style about what he sees around him, about what happens to him and to others, so he gives us a very honest and a realistic picture of whatever he writes. This poem which is titled Next, please is a simple poem and when you read the poem you will understand just how he writes about things that we can easily relate to. The poem is a short one, six stanzas of four lines each.This is how the poem goes
(Kavita recites)
Okay so that's the poem he says that we are always too eager for the future. Who is this we? It is the poet and all of us the readers, human beings in general. We always pin great hopes and expectations on the future and we pick up bad habits of expectancy, always expecting and waiting for something to happen. For example, we expect that we will win the lottery, or that we’ll get a better job. or somebody will give us a gift – so we always keep hoping for better things. And often these are unfounded hopes; that indicates we are too eager for the future. We pick up the bad habits of expectancy. It is not actually clever to keep expecting that things will improve; we are not being realistic about life, we live in dreams.
Something is always approaching every day. When something does finally arrive we keep telling ourselves how slow they are in arriving:
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!
He gives us a picture of a person standing on a bluff watching and looking out into the sea, expecting a ship to come, and imagining a sparkling armada, an armada of promises.
Yet what happens finally the ships come but they don't stop they still leave us holding wretched stocks of flowers. Nothing happens and the flowers wither away and finally we are left holding wretched stalks, with no flowers at all or dried up flowers.
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
The final stanza completes the cycle of despair in waiting; what does come for us is death in the form of a ship.
Kumkum
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KumKum chose to read two poems by Emily Dickinson, There's a Certain Slant of Light, and I was the Slightest in the House. Both were simple to understand but carry deep thoughts.
The first poem begins with a natural image ‘a certain slant of light’ on winter afternoons. This leads the narrator to a kind of religious reflection as she attempts to understand the strange feeling the sunbeam evokes and what its presence means. This light is not comforting – it has an oppressive, heavy quality, similar to the solemn, almost overwhelming feeling that exalted music in a a cathedral might evoke. The winter setting often symbolises a period of dormancy or emotional coldness, hinting that the speaker feels isolated or melancholic.
In the second stanza Dickinson introduces the idea of ‘Heavenly Hurt.’ This phrase suggests that the light brings a kind of emotional or spiritual wound, but unlike a physical wound, there is no visible mark. It only leaves an ‘internal difference’, a subtle but profound change in the soul, where deeper meanings lie hidden.
The poet states that this experience of despair is something that ‘none may teach’. It's a personal feeling and can't be shared or explained. Describing it as an ‘imperial affliction’ suggests it is both authoritative and unavoidable, as if despair is a command from nature itself, delivered through the indifferent ‘Air.’
In the final stanza, Dickinson personifies the landscape and shadows as if they, too, are affected by this slant of light.
The quiet that accompanies this light, with shadows that ‘hold their breath,’ suggests a moment of suspension or pause, where everything feels still and attentive and the light fades. The poet compares its absence, to a sense of profound distance and the feeling of separation that death represents.
The second poem, I was the slightest in the House captures Dickinson’s characteristic exploration of themes like self-perception, humility, and the subtle influence of an individual. The speaker's quiet, almost invisible role emphasises the idea that a life lived with humility and discretion could be meaningful. The poem also hints at the bittersweet nature of reflection, as time often reshapes our understanding of who we are and what our presence means.
In essence, Dickinson seems to be saying that even the ‘slightest’ among us has an impact, however small or quiet. The speaker’s life, though modest, is a part of the greater whole, suggesting that significance isn’t always tied to visibility or acclaim. Instead, Dickinson celebrates the power of small things—whispered moments, brief conversations, and lives that resonate quietly yet profoundly with grace.
Bio of the poet Emily Dickinson.
Emily Dickinson commemorative stamp issued by the US Postal service in 1971
Emily Dickinson is one of the most important poets of America. Throughout her life, Dickinson rarely left her home in Amherst, a small town in western Massachusetts. She lived in almost total isolation. Nevertheless, she kept contact with a few people. Emily Dickinson was greatly influenced by the Romantic poets of England. She liked the poetry of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the works of John Keats.
Emily Dickinson wrote a great number of poems during her lifetime. However, she wasn't a recognised poet in her lifetime, because very few of her poems were published during her lifetime. After her death, her family found about 1800 poems in forty hand-sewn fascicles in her wooden chest. These have now all been published and her works are available digitally from Harvard University.
Priya
Rafeef Ziadah (born 1979 in Beirut, Lebanon)
Priya read the Palestinian-Canadian poet, Rafeef Ziadah’s, Shades of Anger. It was written in 2011 but it is relevant again because of the ongoing war by Israel on Gaza. It is full of images of suffering and grief:
Priya read the Palestinian-Canadian poet, Rafeef Ziadah’s, Shades of Anger. It was written in 2011 but it is relevant again because of the ongoing war by Israel on Gaza. It is full of images of suffering and grief:
... did you hear my sister screaming yesterday
as she gave birth at a check point
with Israeli soldiers looking between her legs
...
did you hear Amni Mona screaming
behind their prison bars as they teargassed her cell
“We’re returning to Palestine!”
Rafeef Ziadah
Rafeef Ziadah was born in 1979 in Beirut, Lebanon, to Palestinian refugee parents and began writing at a young age. She grew up in Tunisia and attended York University in Toronto. A spoken word poet, she gave her first public performance in 2004. She got a grant from the Ontario Arts Council for their word of mouth program in 2008. In 2009, she released her first spoken word album, Hadeel, which means the cooing of a dove,.
Ziadah traveled to countries all over the world to perform and conduct poetry workshops. In 2011, she performed with the Palestinian American poet Remy Kanazi in London, England, as part of the tour for his book Poetic Injustice. In 2012, Ziadah was chosen to represent Palestine at the South Bank Centre Poets Olympiad.
In the same year, she performed at the World Village Festival in Helsinki. During the summer of 2014, she contributed an opinion piece for The Guardian newspaper regarding the 2014 Gaza War and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel.
That same year, she performed at a benefit concert for Palestine and Palestinian hip-hop group, Damn Palestine, sponsored by Manchester Palestine Action.
Her live readings offer a moving blend of poetry and music. Hadeel, her debut album is dedicated to Palestinian youth, who still fly kites in the face of Israeli F-16 fighter planes bombing Gaza. Hadeel means the cooing of a pigeon, the sweet morning of the dove. The youth still remember the names of their villages in Palestine and still hear the sound of Hadeel over Gaza.
We Teach Life, her second album, is a powerful collection of spoken words with original music composition, which she brings to the stage with Australian guitarist and We Teach Live producer, Phil Monsa.
Her third album, Three Generations, is a selection of spoken word poems. The sequence of linked poems is a deeply moving, powerful, personal remembrance of Palestine.
Raffef Ziadah currently lives in London. She was motivated by her experience of racism to write poems.
The al-Nakba, meaning the catastrophe in Arabic, refers to the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their home and land during the establishment of Israel in 1947-49. Up to 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes.
Priya said that this is a political poem and she chooses not to take sides between the two warring countries because war is never a victory for human beings. She said, “Look how humanity suffers, that's the saddest part about it.”
The poem alludes to Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba, two names that have become synonymous with the fight against imperialism and colonialism. These two visionary leaders, from different corners of the world, shared a common fate: both were violently ousted from power by the CIA and met tragic ends. Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile, were both victims of ruthless forces that sought to preserve colonial dominance.
Ziadah traveled to countries all over the world to perform and conduct poetry workshops. In 2011, she performed with the Palestinian American poet Remy Kanazi in London, England, as part of the tour for his book Poetic Injustice. In 2012, Ziadah was chosen to represent Palestine at the South Bank Centre Poets Olympiad.
In the same year, she performed at the World Village Festival in Helsinki. During the summer of 2014, she contributed an opinion piece for The Guardian newspaper regarding the 2014 Gaza War and Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), a nonviolent Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel.
That same year, she performed at a benefit concert for Palestine and Palestinian hip-hop group, Damn Palestine, sponsored by Manchester Palestine Action.
Her live readings offer a moving blend of poetry and music. Hadeel, her debut album is dedicated to Palestinian youth, who still fly kites in the face of Israeli F-16 fighter planes bombing Gaza. Hadeel means the cooing of a pigeon, the sweet morning of the dove. The youth still remember the names of their villages in Palestine and still hear the sound of Hadeel over Gaza.
We Teach Life, her second album, is a powerful collection of spoken words with original music composition, which she brings to the stage with Australian guitarist and We Teach Live producer, Phil Monsa.
Her third album, Three Generations, is a selection of spoken word poems. The sequence of linked poems is a deeply moving, powerful, personal remembrance of Palestine.
Raffef Ziadah currently lives in London. She was motivated by her experience of racism to write poems.
The al-Nakba, meaning the catastrophe in Arabic, refers to the violent expulsion of Palestinians from their home and land during the establishment of Israel in 1947-49. Up to 750,000 Palestinians were expelled or fled from their homes.
Priya said that this is a political poem and she chooses not to take sides between the two warring countries because war is never a victory for human beings. She said, “Look how humanity suffers, that's the saddest part about it.”
The poem alludes to Salvador Allende and Patrice Lumumba, two names that have become synonymous with the fight against imperialism and colonialism. These two visionary leaders, from different corners of the world, shared a common fate: both were violently ousted from power by the CIA and met tragic ends. Lumumba, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile, were both victims of ruthless forces that sought to preserve colonial dominance.
Saras
Auden's poetry is noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as Funeral Blues; on political and social themes, such as September 1, 1939 and The Shield of Achilles; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes, such as For the Time Being and Horae Canonicae.
Auden was born in York, England, and grew up in and near Birmingham in a professional, middle-class family. He attended various English public schools and studied English at Christ Church College, Oxford. After a few months in Berlin in 1928–29, he spent five years (1930–1935) teaching in British private preparatory schools. In 1939, he moved to the United States; he became an American citizen in 1946, while retaining his British citizenship. Auden taught from 1941 to 1945 in American universities, followed by occasional visiting professorships in the 1950s.
In the early 1930s W.H. Auden was acclaimed prematurely by some as the foremost poet then writing in English, on the disputable ground that his poetry was more relevant to contemporary social and political realities than that of T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats, who previously had shared the summit. By the time of Eliot’s death in 1965, however, a convincing case could be made for the assertion that Auden was indeed Eliot’s successor, as Eliot had inherited sole claim to supremacy when Yeats died in 1939.
Auden as a poet, was far more copious and varied than Eliot and far more uneven. He tried to interpret the times, to diagnose the ills of society and deal with intellectual and moral problems of public concern. But the need to express the inner world of fantasy and dream was equally apparent, and, hence, the poetry is sometimes bewildering. If the poems, taken individually, are often obscure—especially the earlier ones—they create, when taken together, a meaningful poetic cosmos with symbolic landscapes and mythical characters and situations. In his later years Auden ordered the world of his poetry and made it easier of access; he collected his poems, revised them, and presented them chronologically in two volumes: Collected Shorter Poems 1927–57 (1967) and Collected Longer Poems (1969).
Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of book-length). His poetry was encyclopaedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks, from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from contemporary crises to the evolution of society.
He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics, music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher Isherwood, and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman, and worked with a group of artists and filmmakers on documentary films in the 1930s and with the New York Pro Musica early music group in the 1950s and 1960s.
Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found "boring" or "dishonest" in the sense that they expressed views he had never held but had used only because he felt they would be rhetorically effective. His rejected poems include Spain and September 1, 1939. His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction to Selected Poems that Auden's practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry and his reluctance to misuse it. (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and early texts of poems that he revised.)
Saras chose to read two poems by Auden, The Night Mail and Funeral Blues.
The Night Mail was written for the acclaimed 1936 documentary Night Mail made by the GPO Film Unit , and was accompanied with music by a young Benjamin Britten. There is an interesting piece about the creation of this documentary here.
Britten wasn't into jazz, but he did write music that caught the rhythms of a train, as did Auden in his poem. Auden wrote the poetry for the film on an old table, in noisy, ramshackle surroundings, at the Film Unit's main office in Soho Square, chopping and changing his lines as he watched the rough cut, or (as he put it) timing “the spoken verse with a stopwatch in order to fit it exactly to the shot on which it commented.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/dec/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview10
A reader can almost hear the train chugging along as it brings letters to the people of England and Scotland, especially in the first part. Joe commented that this is one of the things that is completely absent in modern society – that we don’t write letters. Devika mentioned that when her sister got married she lived in a remote part of North Bengal where there were no telephones, and writing letters was the only means of communication. So they would write one every week. Joe’s one regret is that none of us bothered to store these letters and make them into a real storehouse of memories and joys from the past. No one foresaw that technology would change our lives in myriad ways and that writing letters would become a practice of the past.
Funeral Blues (Stop all the Clocks) is a famous poem and universally understood. Curiously, it began life as a piece of burlesque sending up blues lyrics of the 1930s; Auden originally wrote it for a play he was writing with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6 (1936), which wasn’t entirely serious. But the poem has nevertheless become a genuine and heartfelt expression of grief to thousands of readers, and a favourite reading at funerals. Joe said that he remembered this poem very well because it was recited in a movie called Four Weddings and a Funeral. which had leading actorss like Simon Callow, Hugh Grant, and Kristin Scott Thomas. Saras said one of the reasons she picked chose this was because she heard a recitation by actor Tom Hiddleston and it sounded so beautiful. John Hannah in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral expresses the emotion even more sensitively in his Scottish accent
The Night Mail was written for the acclaimed 1936 documentary Night Mail made by the GPO Film Unit , and was accompanied with music by a young Benjamin Britten. There is an interesting piece about the creation of this documentary here.
Britten wasn't into jazz, but he did write music that caught the rhythms of a train, as did Auden in his poem. Auden wrote the poetry for the film on an old table, in noisy, ramshackle surroundings, at the Film Unit's main office in Soho Square, chopping and changing his lines as he watched the rough cut, or (as he put it) timing “the spoken verse with a stopwatch in order to fit it exactly to the shot on which it commented.”
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/dec/01/featuresreviews.guardianreview10
A reader can almost hear the train chugging along as it brings letters to the people of England and Scotland, especially in the first part. Joe commented that this is one of the things that is completely absent in modern society – that we don’t write letters. Devika mentioned that when her sister got married she lived in a remote part of North Bengal where there were no telephones, and writing letters was the only means of communication. So they would write one every week. Joe’s one regret is that none of us bothered to store these letters and make them into a real storehouse of memories and joys from the past. No one foresaw that technology would change our lives in myriad ways and that writing letters would become a practice of the past.
Funeral Blues (Stop all the Clocks) is a famous poem and universally understood. Curiously, it began life as a piece of burlesque sending up blues lyrics of the 1930s; Auden originally wrote it for a play he was writing with Christopher Isherwood, The Ascent of F6 (1936), which wasn’t entirely serious. But the poem has nevertheless become a genuine and heartfelt expression of grief to thousands of readers, and a favourite reading at funerals. Joe said that he remembered this poem very well because it was recited in a movie called Four Weddings and a Funeral. which had leading actorss like Simon Callow, Hugh Grant, and Kristin Scott Thomas. Saras said one of the reasons she picked chose this was because she heard a recitation by actor Tom Hiddleston and it sounded so beautiful. John Hannah in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral expresses the emotion even more sensitively in his Scottish accent
Shobha
She was the only woman poet to join the Movement, an English group of poets dedicated to an anti-romantic aesthetic. Philip Larkin was also a member. She won the Cholmondeley award, Somerset Maugham award and the W.H Smith Literary award.
She published 26 books of poetry in her lifetime. She was a dedicated Roman Catholic. An important theme in Jenning’s poetry is art.
Visit to an artist, In a picture gallery, Works of art, Questions to other artists, Vision to an artist … are some of her other poems on the the theme of art.
The poem titled Rembrandt’s Late Self-portraits focuses on the honesty of the artist in painting himself as he was in old age. Rembrandt painted himself throughout his life. The first was done at 22 years of age. By then, he had moved to Amsterdam from Leiden, his home town. He became a successful and much sought-after artist. He bought a large house in this period. His house is preserved as the Rembrandt House Museum in Amsterdam.
In his later years, he took up self portraits again, doing one a year.
You are confronted with yourself.Each year
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly
Your brush’s care runs with self- knowledge
In our discussion, we spoke of the artist truthfully recording the changes that are happening to him; it is an act of simple recording, devoid of pride, in no way self-glorifying. We discussed the self portraits of our times, namely, selfies taken with a smartphone camera. They are false because we take several and choose the one that flatters us on a given day.
There is the story of a young girl who fell to her death while taking a selfie in a dangerous position.
The other poem, The Painter, describes an artist painting a vase of roses near a window.
The roses and the lights collide
As he withdraws his shadow from the view.
The artist separates himself as his work is done. The art lives on, and the artist lives on in his work.
Zakia
Rudyard Kipling, one of the best-known poets and storytellers of the late Victorian era, was both celebrated and controversial. Although he received the Nobel Prize in 1907, his pro-colonial and nationalist views made him unpopular among critics, who labeled him a colonialist and racist. Yet his literary contributions, particularly children’s classics like The Jungle Book, have remained culturally significant.
Born in India in 1865 to parents immersed in art, Kipling spent his early childhood there, but was later sent to England for schooling, enduring a harsh period of bullying and loneliness. This difficult childhood and later schooling experiences deeply impacted him. In his early career as a journalist in India, Kipling gained popularity with his poems and stories, capturing both the local colour and British imperial life.
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Rudyard Kipling, English journalist, short story writer, poet and novelist
After returning to England in 1889, Kipling quickly became a literary sensation. He eventually married and lived in Vermont, USA, for a time, where he wrote The Jungle Books — the cornerstone of his reputation as a children’s author. His works for children often drew inspiration from Indian folklore and Buddhist Jataka tales.
After moving back to England, Kipling settled in Sussex, where he wrote Just So Stories and Puck of Pook’s Hill, inspired by English history and local artifacts. Though he was once a beloved public figure, his support for British imperialism and militaristic views contributed to his growing isolation. In his later years, he was appointed literary advisor to the Imperial War Graves Commission but became increasingly disillusioned and reclusive, especially after the death of his son, John, in World War I. Kipling’s letters, preserved across three volumes, reveal a complex figure: a devoted family man and British loyalist who struggled with contradictions and held deep ambivalence about his own identity and views. He died in 1936, leaving behind a complicated legacy shaped by both literary brilliance and divisive opinions.
This is taken from the Poetry Foundation’s site, summarised by ChatGPT:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/rudyard-kipling
Zakia recited Kipling’s poem If— which constitutes a father’s advice to his son on how to live a resilient and praiseworthy life. The speaker outlines the qualities of patience, self-confidence, and honesty while urging his son to stay calm amid chaos and not to respond to hate or lies with the same negativity. He emphasises a balanced approach to ambition and setbacks, suggesting that dreams and successes should not control one’s life. The speaker further advises taking risks, enduring losses without complaint, and persevering even when exhausted. The poem concludes by highlighting the importance of filling every moment with purpose. If his son can master these qualities, he will achieve a fulfilling and successful life, symbolised by “being a man.”
The Poems
Arundhaty – poem by Marilyn K Walker
The Clothesline
A clothesline was a news forecast
To neighbors passing by.
There were no secrets you could keep
When clothes were hung to dry.
It also was a friendly link
For neighbors always knew
If company had stopped on by
To spend a night or two.
For then you'd see the fancy sheets
And towels, on the line;
You'd see the comp'ny tablecloths
With intricate design.
The line announced a baby's birth
To folks who lived inside
As brand new infant clothes were hung
So carefully with pride.
The ages of the children could
So readily be known
By watching how the sizes changed
You'd see how much they'd grown.
It also told when illness struck
As extra sheets were hung.
Then nightclothes and a bathrobe, too,
Haphazardly were strung.
It said, "Gone on vacation now"
When lines hung limp and bare.
It told, "We're back!" when full lines sagged
With not an inch to spare.
New folks in town were scorned upon
When wash was dingy gray
For neighbors raised their brows, and looked
Disgustedly away.
But clotheslines now are of the past
For dryers make work less.
Now what goes on inside a home
Is anybody's guess.
I really miss that way of life.
It was a friendly sign
When neighbors knew each other best
By what hung on the line!
Devika – 2 poems of Keki Daruwalla
Migrations
Migrations are always difficult:
ask any drought,
any plague;
ask the year 1947.
Ask the chronicles themselves:
if there had been no migrations
would there have been enough
history to munch on?
Going back in time is also tough.
Ask anyone back-trekking to Sargodha
or Jhelum or Mianwali and they’ll tell you.
New faces among old brick;
politeness, sentiment,
dripping from the lips of strangers.
This is still your house, Sir.
And if you meditate on time
that is no longer time –
(the past is frozen, it is stone,
that which doesn’t move
and pulsate is not time) –
if you meditate on that scrap of time,
the mood turns pensive
like the monsoons
gathering in the skies
but not breaking.
Mother used to ask, don’t you remember my mother?
You’d be in the kitchen all the time
and run with the fries she ladled out,
still sizzling on the plate.
Don’t you remember her at all?
Mother’s fallen face
would fall further
at my impassivity.
Now my dreams ask me
If I remember my mother
And I am not sure how I’ll handle that.
Migrating across years is also difficult.
Prayer
Let not the harsh winds of our times blow love away.
Let not the harsh winds of our times blow our perceptions into a wall behind which people are sharpening knives.
Let not the harsh dreams of our times devour us, along with our appetites.
Lead us from this landscape of rubble to water, but let the sound be real - even traffic sounds like surf at night.
And let water remain water and not turn to blood.
....Let the repressed be brought into light, the hidden into knowledge.
Let there be harmony between those who speak of shadows and those who speak of the sun.
Let the unlit be lit.
Steer the light our way.
Let the forest leaf.
Let the lyric leaf.
Geetha – poem by Vikram Seth
The Stray Cat
The grey cat stirs upon the ledge
Outside the glass just at dawn.
I open it, he tries to wedge
His nose indoors. It is withdrawn.
He sits back to assess my mood.
He sees me frown; he thinks of food.
I am familiar with his stunts.
His Grace unfed will not expire.
He may be hungry, but he hunts
When needs compel him, or desire.
Just yesterday he caught a mouse
And I yo-yoed it outside the house.
But now he turns his topaz eyes
Upon my eyes, which must reveal
The private pressures of these days,
The numb anxieties I feel.
But no, his grayness settles back
And yawns and let his limbs go slack.
He ventures forth an easy paw
As if in bargain. Thus addressed,
I fetch a bowl, and watch him gnaw
The star-shaped nuggets he likes best.
He is permitted food and I
The furred indulgence of a side.
Joe – 2 poems by Nguyen Chi Thien
My Mother (1962)
My mother on anniversaries or festival days
Is wont to put her hands together and pray for a long time
Her old saffron dress has somewhat faded
But I would see her take it out for the occasion
My life being full of suffering and injustice
Mother always has to pray for me
A son who has seen a number of jail terms
Causing tears to flow in streams on Mother’s cheeks.
Sitting next to her, I find myself so small
Next to the great vast love of my mother.
Mother, I only have one real wish
And that is, never to be far away from you!
Now each time that you sit in prayer
For your sick prisoner son in the deep jungle
The old, fading saffron dress you wear
Must be soaked with tears unending!
My Heart (1964)
My heart, that endless story, is something
That only a child will understand, love and like
He will not fully grasp its profundity or richness
But will instinctively share its marvelous quality.
My heart? It’s the pen, inkstand and paper tube
Of a gentleman-scholar unlucky at the exams
Left in a corner to gather dust and dream
Of a homecoming procession with chaise and pennants
streaming like a river!
My heart? It’s a red hot pepper
That not many of those used to sweet stuff
Dare out of curiosity come close to get a taste
For as soon as they lick it they have to pull right back.
My heart? It’s a poor roadside inn with winds coming
through the cracks
Where only lost travelers stop for the night
In the thick darkness, in the cold settling dew
Missing their way, they will go there to find shelter
And a little warmth coming from a tiny oil lamp.
My heart is at the bottom of a vale but grass-matted
Always ready to help those fallen on bad days
Who from their heights used to belittle others
To find themselves toppled one day.
My heart? It’s an ancient palace
Quietly mirroring in the shimmering water
A few passers by will understand and bow their heads
But no one will actually want to buy it!
My heart originally was a mulberry field
Which changed itself into a roaring sea
Now it is no more than a dune
Where the sandcrab has long ceased its work
My heart can now be likened to a deep wet field
That awaits the floodwaters & rains of July-August
So that it can overflow into a thousand waves
White-crested ones that will sweep everything away!
Kavita – poem by Philip Larkin
Next, Please
Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,
Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!
Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,
Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last
We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.
KumKum – 2 poems by Emily Dickinson
320. There's a certain Slant of light,
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –
Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –
None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –
When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –
486. I was the slightest in the House
I was the slightest in the House—
I took the smallest Room—
At night, my little Lamp, and Book—
And one Geranium—
So stationed I could catch the Mint
That never ceased to fall—
And just my Basket—
Let me think—I'm sure—
That this was all—
I never spoke—unless addressed—
And then, 'twas brief and low—
I could not bear to live—aloud—
The Racket shamed me so—
And if it had not been so far—
And any one I knew
Were going—I had often thought
How noteless—I could die—
Pamela (not attending)
Priya – poem by Rafeef Ziadah
Shades of Anger
Allow me to speak my Arab tongue
before they occupy my language as well.
Allow me to speak my mother tongue
before they colonise her memory as well.
I am an Arab woman of color.
and we come in all shades of anger.
All my grandfather ever wanted to do
was wake up at dawn and watch my grandmather kneel and pray
in a village hidden between Jaffa and Haifa
my mother was born under an olive tree
on a soil they say is no longer mine
but I will cross their barriers, their check points
their damn apartheid walls and return to my homeland
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
And did you hear my sister screaming yesterday
as she gave birth at a check point
with Israeli soldiers looking between her legs
for their next demographic threat
called her baby girl “Janeen”.
And did you hear Amni Mona screaming
behind their prison bars as they teargassed her cell
“We’re returning to Palestine!”
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
But you tell me, this womb inside me
will only bring you your next terrorist
beard wearing, gun waving, towelhead, sand nigger
You tell me, I send my children out to die
but those are your copters, your F16′s in our sky
And let’s talk about this terrorism business for a second
Wasn’t it the CIA that killed Allende and Lumumba
and who trained Osama in the first place
My grandparents didn’t run around like clowns
with the white capes and the white hoods on their heads lynching black people
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
“So who is that brown woman screaming in the demonstration?”
Sorry, should I not scream?
I forgot to be your every orientalist dream
Jinnee in a bottle, belly dancer, harem girl, soft spoken Arab woman
Yes master, no master.
Thank you for the peanut butter sandwiches
raining down on us from your F16′s master
Yes my liberators are here to kill my children
and call them “collateral damage”
I am an Arab woman of colour and we come in all shades of anger.
So let me just tell you this womb inside me
will only bring you your next rebel
She will have a rock in one hand and a Palestinian flag in the other
I am an Arab woman of color
Beware! Beware my anger…
(419 words)
Saras – 2 poems by W.H. Auden
The Nightmail
Funeral Blues July 2009, June 2014
Night Mail
This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
(348 words)
Funeral Blues
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
(136 words)
Shoba – 2 poems by Elizabeth Jennings
The Painter
It is the waiting keeps the flowers true
As, standing near, he watches how the leaves
Collect their shadows, concentrates on them.
The petals are weighed down by dew.
It is the paint upon his brush relieves
The shadows and confusion. He will make
The dew dissolve, the colours on the vase
Add to the blooms not snatch away from them;
The lights behind the window break.
It is his palette penetrates the glass.
And then it's done, all seasons set aside
Although the flowers stress 'spring'. He is removed
Now from the colours and the conflict too.
The roses and the lights collide
As he withdraws his shadow from the view.
Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits
You are confronted with yourself. Each year
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond. Your brush's care
Runs with self-knowledge. Here
Is a humility at one with craft.
There is no arrogance. Pride is apart
From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift
The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt
But there is still love left.
Love of the art and others. To the last
Experiment went on. You stared beyond
Your age, the times. You also plucked the past
And tempered it. Self-portraits understand
And old age can divest,
With truthful changes, us of fear of death.
Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,
The sadness and the joy. To paint's to breathe,
And all the darknesses are dared. You chose
What each must reckon with.
Zakia – poem by Rudyard Kipling
If—
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Beautiful blog! Read the poems again today. Lovely they are! But I must say how well each reader wrote his/her entry for the blog! Aren’t we becoming expers in putting our thoughts together?
ReplyDeleteOf Course, we owe to Joe and Geetha for polishing our pieces!