Tue. Nov 5th, 2024

Yogesh Maitreya- The Bridge of Migration

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.

 

Related Post

Comments are closed.