Five Poems from the book– The Bridge of Migration:
1. Childhood Friends
We all
Grew Up
Together
Learnt
One slang,
Ate
One soil,
Stole
The same fruit
From
The neighbourhood.
Today
They kneel down
Before hunger
And I,
I write poems.
Their desires are still simple,
Mine become much subtler.
2. Choice
I do not know
When I started
To write.
I wanted to let go
What I saw
That made me what I am today.
But
It was unbearable to put
Everything
Into a heart.
It was suffocating
To think about
My father who destroyed
His youth for us
Later victimised by liquor
And Bollywood’s poison
And,
The mother who showed
Remarkable patience
In removing
The quilt of night from my brain and
To introduce me
The little sunshine
Of life.
In this, where I was supposed to find
The origin of love?
For a poet,
It is too much to see
And, do not write.
Yet, someone must
Make a clear choice:
Whether to sustain the pain of death
While being conscious,
Or splitting the nerve at once
To kill the time to ease
The course of death.
Hence,
I made my choice and one day
I wrote first few letters on the white paper
With the pen dipped in the blood.
3. Defining love
Every time
When you left me,
You plucked me out
Like a flower
Of your choice
And took me away
With you.
But whenever
You were with me
I ate you
Presuming as fresh bread
Prepared by my mother
That only nurtured me
In every odds of life.
4. Sisters
(Mayuri, Sonali, Aakansha)
During these amorphous years
Of our lives
Much has remained untouched.
The centre of poet’s life was missing.
I tried to paint our dejected world
Through imagination and words.
But I forgot that
When I wanted to read
You were washing utensils and then
Opened the book to study and
Learnt lessons directly from the life.
I have forgotten
That I read in leisure
But you read only after toiling
For the men in our family.
I have forgotten that
The most beautiful thing
In poet’s life aren’t words
Or imagination but the people,
Who toil for him.
I have forgotten that
They are the centre of his poetry.
5. Learning to speak
Unlike them
My tongue wasn’t chiselled by school
And trained to speak
In their usual ways.
I learnt the lessons
Written on the famished pages of night
Into my father’s tumultuous eyes
And when found the source
Of my being rejected as a mind
In this society,
I wrote poetry, and I abuse those assholes.
Yogesh Maitreya is a student of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and publisher at Panther’s Paw Publication.
To read more of his poems, you can buy the Book from Amazon.
English
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