FLARE UP – THE PASSION

By   Arshiya Chahal

Illustrated By   Arshiya Chahal

 
When the boundless enthusiasm and immense desire,
The ardent love and inner fire,
The wistful hunger and the blazing flame within,
And the colossal charisma which always brings a grin,
Are blended in each moment, be it formidable or easy,
Then even the hardest of the things turn out to be simple and breezy.
When life is glimpsed upon as though our favorite show on television,
When we get engrossed in each and every scene,
When the devotion and interest are generated on their own,
And the energetic determination to outshine is grown,
And when your passion tells you to face the jeering throng alone,
That is when in your life, true passion is shown.
Many possess the passion for certain specific things,
But only a few attain achievements, adding to their amorousness.
Ones who hold the fire within, but the times they cannot withstand
Let their fire become ashes and smoke, and it happens all unplanned.
But those who have the yearning, burning flame of desire inside,
In them does the real glow of fire reside.
Passion is where the heart flows,
It is one’s real desire from the nose to the toes.
It is doing what one wants to do, what one likes to do,
It is not something one has been made to forcefully pursue.
As life is not only about creating oneself,
It is also about finding the passion of your life, the Real Yourself.

I Want To Fly

By Prerna Sharma

Image Source: Pinterest              

 

I want to fly

Higher and higher,

Like a bird.

 

I want to fly

Without restrictions,

Where no one else can stop me.

 

I want to live my life to the fullest,

A life no one will interrupt.

 

I want someone to motivate me to fly,

Not someone who will cut my wings.

 

I want to achieve my dreams,

I don’t want to stop,

I don’t want to get back on the ground ever again.

 

I’ll fly here and there,

Like a bird and never come back

To this grouchy world.

 

I want to fly,

Higher and higher,

Like a bird.

The Passionate Heart

By Disha

Image Source: Tumblr

The frosty roads

The closed doors

All led me to the pristine slopes.

I pulled apart every rope

I knocked at every wall,

I passed through every hall.

I was a puppet and you had my strings,

No more says my instincts,

Everyone believed that I was wrong,

How can you change what’s been around for ages, they asked.

I am sorry I said,

I am afraid I can’t.

You are rotten apples and empty cells,

You and I are poles apart,

It’s time for me to stand,

Leaving behind you

I will build my own town

Because traveling is my life you see!

These rocks are my friends,

The seashore is my home.

The marvelous sky above is my fuel,

Fears are my ground.

You people will never know

What it takes for a girl to burn and earn.

I don’t want to follow anyone,

I want to be myself and the only one.

Never Going Away

                                                           

By Bhavya

Image Source: Tumblr

 

I nearly lost someone I loved.

And I wanted her back. I wanted some magic to happen and bring her back to me.

But she’d never come. Ever.

But magic would happen.

She won’t go away. She isn’t going away.

I want to hold her hand and her to hold mine,

The way we did when she was sitting on the bed with me beside her.

Both of us were helpless and unable to speak.

One because of illness. The other was too afraid of choking up.

Oh, I love her so much. And she loves me back.

She didn’t want to go. I didn’t want her to go. No one wanted her to go.

Then Cancer, why did you do this to her?

Why did you do this to us?

I miss her.

She is the Sun, and a bird. Happy and free.

Like a child, innocent in her being.

Cancer, why did you do this to her?

Cancer, why did you do this to us?

Everyone adores her – her family, friends, colleagues, and society.

Cancer, why did you do this to her?

Cancer, why did you do this to us?

Dear Cancer, do you know

How she cracks silly jokes to make us laugh,

How wide she smiles in a room filled with the laughter of the people she loves?

And you snatched her smile and our laughter from us.

Cancer, why don’t you answer?

We asked the doctors, they don’t know.

Cancer, why did you do this to her?

Cancer, why did you do this to us?

Tell me, why?

I shriek at the walls.

Tell me! Tell me, why?

“Cancer is nowhere to be found. It’ll die with her.”

But, did it?

No. No, it’s not the end.

Real life tales also have happy endings.

She once spoke to me, albeit with a lot of difficulties.

Her eyes shed a thousand words. Her lips spoke five. Five magical words.

“It isn’t in my blood.”

“It isn’t in my blood” took possession of me.

Those five words weighed more than hundreds of words by hundreds of people.

She’s never going away. Her words are never going away.

And that is where I begin.

And now I am determined to make her words and this world realize

That cancer can’t kill people. Cancer makes them stronger.

Love, I know for sure you’re much better off right now.

With no pain in your brain anymore.

Wherever she is at present, she must be busy impressing the world there.

And I here, am doing the same…making life better again.

Diffidence

                                                                   

By Neelesha Dhawan 

Image Source: Tumblr

 

As the steam from your cup
Mingles with the fog
And your sighs create
A sheet of dismay on your glasses
I know
This is the end
As your lips quiver
With the hotness
The hesitancy in your touch
Is tangible across the stall
With a slight dampness
Your gaze travels
Lingers a minute
Before dissolving again in the cup
And as your sighs create
A sheet of emptiness on your glasses
I know
You have lost your articulation
Yet again
And as the steam from your cup
Mingles with the fog
I know yet again
That you’ve lost your audacity
Yet again
And tonight
A mug of liquor
Will do the job
Of what a cup at a stall
Could not

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Happens When Worlds Collide?

By Bhavya

Image Source: Tumblr

When planets collide against one another, they form dents at the point of collision. Holes in their lives that are too large to be rebuilt.

When an asteroid collided with the earth, it left a hole in the planet. One so large that it couldn’t be filled with the nebulae or space. But in losing a part of itself, the earth found a faithful companion. It controlled the pulling and pushing of tides, it created hurricanes that would shatter forests. But it also gave us light. It gave us something to write poems and songs on. We didn’t call it destruction. We called it love.

When tectonic plates collide, the destruction is so massive that it creates earthquakes. But in the end, it builds. It creates mountains and hills, inching higher and higher every moment that they grow closer.

When worlds collide, it is destructive. We lose friends, we lie to our parents and we wreck our sleep cycle. But in the end, even if they drift apart or leave us broken, it builds something. A new experience. If they stay forever, we find a new companion. Our intertwined hands are the mountains we’ve built. Our bodies, a mesh of shattered stardust.

Sometimes we’re too blinded by the sun to see the moon illuminating our darkest nights.
Even if the consequences are absolutely terrible, it leaves something in the end.
Maybe it’s worth finding out what it may be.

City Of Water

By P. Snigdha

With City of Water, Anindita Sengupta takes us on a journey spanning a lifetime of experiences – from heartbreak to despair, subtle existentialism to fervent cries for help.

Anindita Sengupta writes with a skilled pen, she articulates her deepest of thoughts with an apparent ease, resonating with the reader’s own experiences.

The collection is divided into six parts – Thirst, A Sense of Rain, Flash Flood, Drown, Still Water, and Swim.

As the names suggest, with each part we ascend into a different plane of the poet’s emotions, each a parallel universe of her understanding of reality, coming together to form the idea, the thought, of what she presents herself as – to the reader, as a human.

Her raw, unflinching descriptions of growing up in a household that held naïve ideas of modesty, speak to every one of us who has lived through the same. She writes, in Becoming a Woman:

Cover your head;
This thin translucence
Will protect you.

Pull a smile
Across the thin
Lines of your face.

The gloom in her silent acceptance of disappointment, seems to glow with a steady pulse, as if to guide you home.
Recounting a lost love in I Remember Siachen, she writes:

You wanted freedom, you said,
From both war and love.

I cried on the way back, vowed
I’d never love a soldier gain,
A man for whom death was the only tragedy
Worth mourning.

Page after page, poem after poem, I was awed by the simplicity with which her poetry tackles the most complex of emotions that come with being a person who chooses to remain unafraid, unrelenting in the face of love.

Her metaphors and similes hit you of out of nowhere – delivering the full blow of the emotions, as intended.

Thus, you feel the ‘noon heat prickle like cheap wood’ on your skin and in your eyes.
When the snails make their way up the walls, you can picture them in your head as clear as day – their crusts, their feet, et al.
After reading The Migrant’s Wife, you probably won’t be able to shake off the distinct feeling that says, “I feel like I met her just this morning!”

As the preface by Keki Daruwala aptly puts it, “Anindita Sengupta never lets a poem run away with her. Like all good poets, she is original both in her way with words and her personal angle of vision.”

Her tone in her poetry is vividly varied. On one page, she seeks “the strength to forget,” later she is overtly curious and pokes questions at none other than Medusa herself, and yet in some others, she is observant; drinking in the details that lie before her.

Anindita Sengupta‘s poetry has been published in several journals including Eclectica, Nth Position, Yellow Medicine Review, Origami Condom, Pratilipi, Cha: An Asian Journal, Kritya,and Muse India. It has also appeared in the anthologies Mosaic (Unisun, 2008), Not A Muse(Haven Books, 2009), and Poetry with Prakriti (Prakriti Foundation, 2010). She is also a freelance writer and journalist and has contributed articles to The Guardian (UK), The Hindu, Outlook Traveler and Bangalore Mirror.

Anindita Sengupta’s word choice of words, the placing and pattern of phrases, the intricately woven similes – each and every word that she pours on paper, comes splashing at your face. The reader is drenched in the downpour of her ramblings, ruminations, recollections, and so, so much more.

 

maybe he is my moon

By Shafali

I’ve been suffering from,
an exclusive type
of writer’s block
when it comes to
writing about him.
Because he becomes
stranger and stranger
every time I sit down
to pour him on paper.
I know him but
maybe, just maybe
I don’t understand him.
I want to highlight his beauty
with subtle similes.
Describe how he’s intimidating,
exaggerating the effects
of his existence on me.
And praise him
with overrated metaphors.
But my words are
In a state of rebel,
not wanting to leave
the back of my mind.
Why? I’d never know.
I’ve given up on
finding the answer.
I won’t stress it
Because I’ve always had
unanswerable questions
hovering in my mind.
Like why didn’t Neil Armstrong
write a poem about the moon?
My friend thinks Armstrong
Didn’t understand poetry.
But I feel like,
he suffered from
an exclusive type of
writer’s block too.
Maybe, just maybe,
He knew poetry;
He just never
understood the moon.