Today’s choice
Previous poems
Ananya S Guha
Halting Dreams
The leaves are growing out of
a harangue of loneliness
palms cupped I listen to silences
of winter or summers
and unmask faces caught in
tangle of storm, the history of
what was not written or recorded
in books, time’s erasure in moments
fraught with changing paths or charge
with turbulence of rains;
A vast momentary haul of a ship’s load
or a vessel’s yachting,
it is fun to remember and demonise time
in these hills where a cloudburst thumps
the heart, pounds on it like merciless beating
of bird’s wings, or like the beak of a crow
steals thunder, I walk and then a reservoir
pumps blood into the hiatus of living the dead.
Or, the dead living. Shadows typically torment,
lengthen or shorten to spin yarns
in these dead blue hills where a rosary
does not match prayer, but the bluish hue
carps on dreams and a thicket of grass
stumbles in front of you. I wash pains momentarily as a rising quicksand halts
my dreams.
Ananya S Guha lives in Shillong. He has ten collections of poetry in English and has been writing and publishing his poetry for the last forty years.
Anna Lewis
With the neon-splashed night at the window
I counted each contraction down, obediently,
as my mother had told me to do.
Bobbie Sparrow
You ask me why
I put myself through that,
as if I jumped out of a plane
14,000 feet of fear and longing.
Chris Rice
You wake up (so you tell me)
to the lurid gold of summer
splashed like paint across
your tea-brown walls
Karin Molde
Fortuna rolls the dice in Tumahole Free State, South Africa I have never seen a baby so tiny outside a womb. You hold her jigsaw of bones in a blanket, afraid to scatter the pieces in case they’d sail like seeds onto the road. A dung beetle rolls...
Siobhan Ward
The Renault rocks left to right, waddles up an unmade road, squeezes through the trees.
Robin Houghton
I’m looking through a lattice of magnolia
not yet ready to blow open its thousand furring buds—
every year the same urgency—
Lesley Graham
I like soft grass, the sort you see
in early spring sprouting from
improbable interstices,
Robert Nisbet
Our family does weddings.
When Rosalie married, first time round,
and the cars assembled for the drive,
it was in fact a lovely sunrise…
Amirah Al Wassif
I know a fig tree walks in beauty singing a fair song as soon as my heart beats.
She uses elevators & electric stairs