POETLY

Today's post is curated by Kavita Rayirath, who is a fabulous curator of beautiful things on the internet herself. It's a joy to have her guest curating today's post. The love and generosity with which she picks poetry to share with the world, and her knack of finding evocative art to create a dialogue between text and image mustn't be missed! Do swipe to see a beautiful painting that accompanies this poem... Over to you Kavita :) I once read, in the book Continuum Concept,

Yesterday was 6th December. I've been remiss in not paying homage to this country’s most organic, influential thinker, activist and social reformer - Baba saheb Ambedkar. I remember joining droves of people from across Maharashtra at Chaitya Bhoomi to observe "Mahaparinirvan Diwas”. Anybody’d who be a part of that crowd would understand what Ambedkar means to the the Dalits, the marginalised and the pariahs this society disdains. The number of crimes that are commited agains

Ramanujan was a genius. He was a polymath- a polyglot, an academic, a scholar, a philologist, a folklorist, an educator and literary critic, a translator, playwright, and, of course, a poet. This poem embodiess his keen eye, his sensitivity, and, for me, the humility and distancing of the self as ego, the act of creation requires. What is interesting to me is, of course, the vibrant and many-layered application of metaphor, but his exploration of dualities. I think arti

another poem... for Emily. who knew. "The newly emerged insects are attracted to lights in riverside towns and villages and the local authorities deploy snow clearing vehicle to remove their rotting corpses." - https://freshwaterblog.net/…/the-mayflys-lifecycle-a-fasci…/ the mayfly: a biography from her liquid prison she escapes, winged nymph lusting after light. a few hours of breath - then blessed before she falls, with the dance of the possessed - wings askew, sussed

Humans have had the privilege of language and rational thought. an evolutionary gift that I often think, we might have been better off without. This gift has allowed us the luxury of locating ourselves at the centre of the universe. Quite literally. Galileo and Copernicus are sitting together somewhere with a glass of wine, and a cigar, having the last laugh. We are living in the age of the “anthropocene”. The debate for nomenclature and this kind of self-definition, howev

"...a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways..." A poet could find a universe between the gap of a word and its meaning, a phrase and the shadow it casts on reality; between language and her paramour, meaning. This is the joy of metaphor. There is a hiatus between two imaginations, or domains of experience, and that is where the magic happens. The moment Maggie Smith speaks about life with a dry conviction, almost mocking the hollow, syrupy tones that well-meaning adults bes

Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnets are refreshing in their brusqueness. There is a sense of irony in her seemingly clear convictions. She seems to be speaking about her beloved, saying deep emotional truths with a straight face, and by the end, letting a wry smile gently crease the side of her lips. There is honesty in her articulation of love. What I love is the way the persona's convictions slowly shift, how her sarcastic critique of those who make great sacrifices fo

The second poem in the series on sonnets is a Petrarchan sonnet about the joy of discovery; about the moment when we chance upon a thing of beauty, when we see something that is outside our “ken”. Isn’t that what we live for? Novelty is the only kind of immortality that I aspire towards. what I seek, in every relationship, in every collaboration, in every work of art. that I get to witness something that I haven’t before. that new knowledge finds its way to my mind’s e