Writers' Forum Poetry Contest (December): Winning Entries

Winner: Naina Dey, Assistant Professor (Dept. of English) at Maharaja Manindra Chandra College, Kolkata under the University of Calcutta. She is a critic, translator, reviewer and creative writer and her works appear in esteemed newspapers, books and academic journals. She has authored books of critical essays on Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward the Second. She regularly writes for The Statesman. She was awarded the “Excellence in World Poetry Award, 2009” by the International Poets Academy, Chennai. She was invited to be a member of a team of Indian writers (below 45) to be felicitated jointly by Sahitya Akademi and Visva-Bharati University on the occasion of the 150^th birth centenary of Rabindranath Tagore in December, 2010. 

 

Shantipura

This is Shantipura.

Our quaint old Shantipura

With roads unpaved

An inconspicuous speck on your frayed maps

Our Shantipura of dim lights and long power cuts

Where the jackal’s howl mingles with the parrot’s long ti-ti-ti even at midday

Where you hear the rustle of bamboo leaves as you curl up beside your hearths

Like a baby in its mother’s womb

Our Shantipura wakes up to the crows’ call

We too wake up to the whiff of our mother’s steaming rice-pot

As milk-white Mangala fidgets impatiently in her shed

We skip down to the pool where the buffaloes bathe

Grey-black giant rocks that wallow in the sun while a heron balances itself

My little brother tries to catch tadpoles that stare blank-eyed among the reeds

With a shallow dish smuggled out

Eager to enjoy our weekend’s holiday to the hilt

Look how he at first impatiently then playfully flings the limpid water

Making it rise like a wave semi-circular

Droplets of wave sprinkling me as well

As I stand almost knee-deep

Anxious lest he falls

We scamper and shout all day long

Till we hear our mother call

The sunset resounds with the twitter of the sparrows

Bare-bodied shepherd boys whistle for the stray calf

As the shadows grow thicker and darker over our quaint old Shantipura.

 *****

Honourable Mention

Archana Kurup, an employee of Indian Overseas Bank. She is a bilingual writer who has won various prizes in creative writing for her essays, stories and poems in English and Hindi.

Silver Recollections

A spray of silver

Leaping in an arc

Sprinkling sunshine

In rainbow sparkles

Soaking the skin

Drenching the soul…..

Teasing the heart

Into remembering

An era long gone….

Buried under a heap

Of new memories

And experiences….

Struggling to surface

Evoking recollections

Of an age of innocence

Freedom and harmony…

An age of beauty

And joy in simple things….

A moment frozen in time

Still…. and fluid

Lost… but within reach

Happy…. tinged with sadness

In another lifetime….

Another existence…..

***** 

Rosemary Tom, I Year MA English

 

Airy Hope

The river sparkled then.
Trees stooped low in greeting.
Joyous, unadulterated creatures.
Delighting in all things.
Besprinkling arcs of happiness,
they trot, unceasing.
Powerless, yet powerful;
unaccountable to convention.
Owners of nothing, yet of everything-
Unabused trust, untarnished innocence.
Searching for this flowery meadow,
I walk, hoping to retrieve
In a world of stumps and blight,
unaware of having lost it on the way.

*****

Aishwarya Nair, III BA English Copy Editor 

Heading for the Hills



Droplets falling from heaven;
My thoughts are heading for the hills,
They have come to a halt at my childhood,
Oh, that's a sudden stop.

Woven by my brother, childhood was the prettiest time.
Butter-flying with him was my best loved pastime,
Hunting for new places always resulted in the same stamping ground.
But river always fascinated me with her cuddling ways,
She offered me her petals of water.

To make me happy, brother flipped little waves; springing as colored images.
Tiny sprinkles touched my innocent cheeks,
gave me a breezy essence,
Imprinted in my mind those sparkling drops,
forming the shape of a crescent.

My little skirt hugged the wavy rhythm of life,
Swaying like a flower which was thrown up by the breeze,
I grabbed his hands
and walked through the itinerary of happiness.

Mind and body suffused in the chillness of age,
I lost my sense somewhere between the pebbles.
Regaining it, I stood at the bank of memories,
Staring at the black and white memories flowing through the river,
I found that nothing was left.
Petrified by the years of grief, I dropped off my innocence
And merged with the rest,
Fleeing with time, those tiny waves waved goodbye to me forever...