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Writing poetry is not just a pastime from many poets. It becomes a passion for existence. Life is not all joy and pleasurable for people with imaginative preoccupations. Here is poet who describes grief and tribulations. Only self-expression keeps writing, specially poetry, going, for the writer absolutely needed as breathing itself. Sometimes metaphors, symbols and images come in as essentials for penmen - which include women also.

Grief is not the same, or similar in all states of mind and circumstances. A woman, a victim of grievous rape can never be a fresh or lively again. Here is poet who paints the grief through his mind’s eye. Here it is for the thoughtful minds:

Lost

As a little girl
With a few small coins in the grip
Searching for a toffee to buy
I lost my way
In the village fair.
Crying for a doll
I lost my way
While playing
When I lost hold of my Mom’s sari end
I lost my ways
Becoming older
Between innumerable
Searching pages
Signatures to be agreed
I lost my way
When compulsively
I had to bend my neck
Crossing the threshold
Knowing the way home
I lost my way
Though desired and tried
Unable to escape daily clashes
I lost myself from me
When escape itself
Is the marrow of my bones
When mornings are sprouting
All the way
I have been forgetting
Lost I am, even now!!!

Witness

That tree
We don’t know since when
Has been sanding there for years
Under the shade she herself spread
Blood oozed out
And grief stains whirled around
Must have been in silence unseen
From the plots and schemes
That were buried
Life’s griefs that sank by the day
Must have been
Stored in secret hold in her own branches
Round the tree herself hang the roots
Along with time
Unable to bear witness
They must have grown like trees now
She never does, never could, open up
Down history … like water
She leans in the tumblers
Of penmen

Veena Vani (b.1981), daughter of a farmer, is a Post Graduate in Botany, a Gold Medallist, now Telengana Sate Forest Service since 2006. She has brought out her poetry collection in April 2018. She is a columnist in women’s web magazines like Vihanga.

Oddiraju Praveen Kumar writes about stricken minds. Grief is not the same, or similar, in all states of mind and circumstances. Here is poet who paints the grief through his mind’s eye. Here it is for the thoughtful minds: here two poems from such a poet.

Memory

One evening
A faded flower
She came and stood at our threshold
Over the ground the pigeons sit
Jasmines have fallen down, crushed
Grief held her lips stiff
She has forgotten smiling
Becoming a field of grief
Manas she has
An urge to blossom
A feeling of distance
A thirst for flowers
All those are not there except those four
Now she has lost all life
Carries only grief
Far away from me
More near only for herself.

Anguish of Grief

I’m picking up my tear drops
Touching from those you and me – memories slipped down
Between yesterday and today
The knowledge of endless suffering
Picked up and gathered
The sensation of the undesired feeling flowing down
From last night’s dream
Till I was tapped up and woken up
The sleep talk that pursued me
Breaking from soaring prices
And falling earnings
It’s not new to be kissing death
But
It is new to look up with tears, the moisture of grief
I am not able to stay mum
In your multi-coloured festivities
My colour faded
A painful idea of feeling
In the winds of moonlight
The life lost in many a spring
Sleeps constantly in self-hanging ropes
And distasteful pesticides
It is not only when agreements failed
Made in the world’s fields
In our lands the seeds are sown
Why greetings and hollows, now?
Why the wiping of tears ex gratia?
If really, I find a life worth holding on to
I would have kept safe in my head wear!

Oddiraju Praveen Kumar is a poet of distinctive feeling and imagination and succinct expression.

Here is another poet who has astounding expanding imagination and felicity of powerful expression. Brevity is the soul of wit and here you find it.

Shadow of Life in Darkness

Still
For the eyelids
Protecting my eyes
How can I tell
That I have become far for the seen world
Becoming another name for misfortune

The lamp that lost the light in a whirl wind
In the sea of darkness an island looking for directions
The one who cannot walk between the four walls
One I cannot see my own shadow

Alone
This long black night
How can I spend
The dark night on an Amavasya*
The diamond of wings

Escaping from
The hold of the serpent
For the fallen stars the stars shed by the moon
The blindness I saved in my stomach

*Amavasya is the night when the Sun and the Moon are in conjunction

Firefly

From the scientist’s research lab
The test-tube moon that came out half midway

The electricity touches the waterfall
The serial bulb that sparks on the wing wire

The flintstone responding to the friction of wind
The flower dropped from a lightning

A star detective come to
Know the Earth’ secrets

Shining in the bedroom of Amavasya
The cursed moonshine for Parvati’s ire

Slowly swallowing the poison of darkness
Shiva’s lady love giving away nectar

“Each strain of sand
Sucking the Sun bit by bit
Inflames the sky”

Ammangi Venugopal is an educationist specialising in teaching and educational administration. He retired in 2008 and goes on writing poetry now-a-days too.

Writing poetry in regional dialects is a unique craft in and by itself. While translating the dialectical flavour cannot be transmitted. But here is a poet, Usha Rani, working with her avid individual flair for the regional dialect

“Pochampalli”

Coming from the broken tiled wild-date leaf mat
That loom goes on working - like my mom’s heart beat
With hands my hungry eyes move this way and that
That way and this
Weaving yarn in red and white colours
Threads like winding intestines
The pearl sized nose-stead
Like the three-day old gruel transformed
Threads stopped long ago are your hanging ropes
Debts like the cud the buffalo chews
Their announcements
Like the rents in my half-sari
The folded unsold saris on the low cot outside
From the corner with my muddy feet
I walk behind you
The siding sail pulling on in our life
From darkness ends for my travel into light
Folding round me your yellow sari putting a pendal are your wishes and desires
My little brothers flashing alphabet is your wish and hope
Only working on the spangle and embroidery while your fingers on the buttas *
The spot of sindhoor# on your forehead is your own
Like the finger printed colours
Are those I learnt in your lap,
Breathed and yearned only for a Pochampally sari.

* Spangle in hand embroidery in these sarees, both of pure silk and cotton
# Auspicious, rounded vermilion spot on a woman’s forehead indicating that she is a shaasini – an esteemed married woman.

Note : Pochampally is the name given to a sari woven and dyed with spangles and finger-painted designs in the place, in Andhra, now in Telangana State.

This poet Ch. Usha Rani has gained great recognition for using a widely used rural dialect. She is a lecturer teaching both Telugu and Sanskrit in two colleges in Hyderabad, Telangana State.

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