Nilanjana Bose is the author of the wildly popular blogs: Madly-In-Verse and Blooming Against The Fence. An enigmatic, brilliant writer whose poetry flows across the page with quiet lucidity. She has graciously offered to feature three of her lovely sonnets on my highly uncultured blog. Please visit her blogs to be inspired, cheered and entertained.

Not quite poetry…but still…

I.   This is not a poem.  It doesn’t declaim anything, recite

candy floss words melting on the heat of the tongue,

chewy bubble gum ballooning on the faces of the young

ground to a happy nonsense pulp from pink to filmy white.

Poems are different.  They aren’t the spittle of fright

collected in blind corners of lips, and then whistled and sung

as though it had meaning, as though it inevitably hung

together in one grave, luminous arc of meaningful insight.

 

Someday I’ll be able to explain. Explain the hows, and whys,

what is, and what is not a poem.  The lime-wash of a few

rhymes on a life, a bit of fear and love, an element of surprise;

a torn off page of loneliness held gingerly askew

can’t be crumpled into sonnets with a few haphazard tries.

This is not a poem.  It isn’t.  But it’ll have to do.

 

II.   It isn’t about any one single thing, monumental yet delicate,

a distinct spasm of a great narrative convulsed into a ballad.

No patterns in the veins of moods, nor some trace of blood

clapped into the chanting rhythm of fourteen years of sonnets.

Mostly it just sits there alone, lumpy, inarticulate

at one with its surroundings, digging its toes into the mud,

unaware of the lilting moves of the Ramayana and the Iliad.

But lifts its head to search for a thing that it thinks isn’t here yet.

 

This is not a poem, nor does it think it can be one.

A lift of eyelids towards a cloud as toes fondle wet clay,

a sudden lurch of heart towards a bamboo-skewered horizon

abruptly lyrical in silhouette at the two endpoints of the day,

this can’t be stabbed into a verse, there is no choice of weapon.

This isn’t a poem, but it’s all there is.  To recite. Or brush away.

 

III.   Many are not quite poems, though I like to think they’ll be

if I try hard and long enough.  If I am laboriously sincere

stuff will arrange itself into patterns pleasant enough to hear.

But poetry isn’t a function of depths of sincerity.

It’s true the same symbols repeat, the migrant birds, the naked tree

come back in the same formats to haunt me year on year.

The peacock-feather oceans swill to transparent turquoise and clear.

But some of it just passes me by, without the poetry splashing me.

 

So this is not a poem, this waiting by the white foam line

where the gentle palms wave at the winds playing hide and seek,

where the tide recedes to film the sands with the last sunshine,

and it coats the ocean with highlights of a fluorescent mystique;

this waiting, wandering, resting, in the woods of whistling pine,

this doesn’t make a poem.  But it’s all there is. To whisper or to speak.

 

Nilanjana is a poet, writer, blogger and parent, not necessarily in that order.  She was born in India, grew up in West Africa, and has spent most of her life perfecting her technique being a trailing family member. Somewhere along the line, she acquired a Degree in Mathematics and a Diploma in Marketing, though she sees no reason absolutely why those M-s and D-s should be capitals, they’d look much better in lower case.  In fact, the whole world would look much better in lower case, and she would happily follow cummings and jennifer (of Love Story) were it not for the pickiness of the editors she has to submit to, in more ways than one.

She has lived, and sometimes reluctantly worked, in five countries, and travelled another twenty odd.  She speaks English, Bengali, Hindi and understands more Arabic than she can account for.  She has relocated from Cairo to Bahrain this year, where she lives with one husband and one child.  She likes getting under the skins of different cultures; dislikes writing bio’s in the third person, and has never quite managed to get the hang of it, in spite of going at it for years now.  She blogs over at Madly-in-Verse, where the poetry is hung out to dry. Her poetry, fiction and travel memoirs/essays have been published in online journals and in print anthologies, in India and in USA.