POETRY EDITOR ANANYA S GUHA WRITES:
Bistirna Baruah';s poems are masterly strokes of gentility and silence. They are gentle, even the protest poems such as the first one. However the poems are evocative of a deep seated humanism, love for words and music. From contemporary settings to mythology the poems desperately grapple towards an order in a terribly chaotic and disordered world. I loved these poems for their lyricism and meditative qualities. More indefinable powers to the Muse!
SORRY SHAHID
(For human rights activist Shahid Azmi)
Before you started wearing,
That black coat of yours in
Dust and anger filled court rooms
This society had already
Painted you black.
For in this country;
Your past never leaves you.
And judgement happens on drawing rooms,
And in tea shops, in bustling streets.
But they tend to forget that
In the silence of those camps in PoK
Broken by intermittent gun shots
You found your truth: that injustice
Was meted out to you,
So that you could deliver justice.
And you did.
With a gun hanging on your head
You shouted help for others.
The people who killed you
In a mild February night of 2011
Were afraid of you Shahid,
They were afraid of your conviction
Of that simple belief:
"Presumed Innocent until proved guilty".
I am sorry Shahid,
I live in a country
Which desperately needs more
People like you,
People who fight their fights
With nothing to hang on to
But their beliefs.
And yet we remember you,
Only when your life becomes a
Two and a half hour viewing experience.
I am so very sorry Shahid.
There's so little of you in me (as yet).
THE GUITAR
What is a guitar?
Its silence playing
Tic-tac-toe
On six strings
To the beat of the heart.
What does a guitar do?
It puffs gently some cold breeze
Into the embers that twinkle in our souls.
Until we can't tolerate the heat
And break out into a melodic conversation
With Time.
What does a guitar say?
It speaks of the many souls
Who had hopes in their hearts
Beauty in their minds
And fingers on humanity’s pulse.
Who strummed nothingness
Into action.
The Mexican farmer, thatAfrican toddler
The Venetian boatman and the
Drug infested hippie.
Why must we play the guitar?
For we don't play it,
It plays us and when it does,
We must unscrew our tight knots
And let ourselves be taken for a ride
Through a tunnel of mirrors
With our voice for company....
ON WRITING A POEM
Sometimes a thought comes to me
Slowly on tip-toes;
Like a butterfly with wounded wings.
All I do is nurture her
Caress her wings, and slowly
I hear a story.
Being poured in my ears, like honey.
Stories that take place
Right in front of my eyes,
But which I hardly see.
These thoughts that I enflame
Doesn’t speak to me at times.
I have to lie waiting,
Sometimes like a sniper.
And after all that too;
Sometimes, all I get is
A beautiful silence.
It all becomes a play
Of patience and desperation.
At times, words put my heart
On an asphyxiated trial.
But all I can come up are
Obscure sighs on paper.
While at other times,
It is as if my pen doesn’t need
The grip of my fingers.
It wants to play on Paper
And words become Lego blocks.
And all I do is admire
The structure that eventually comes up.
Whatever it might be;
An outcome of desperation or waiting,
When a poem takes shape;
I feel relieved,
As if my heart was a paper
that wanted to dance in the wind,
And the poem a paper weight,
That held it down.
But after so many trials and errors, I know
It shouldn’t ever be forgotten.
That one never writes a poem,
A poem just gets written.
POSSIBILITIES
Let us build a ship
And sail away
To a far-off land where no one
But you and I exist.
We will go there with nothing
Except our naked souls.
We will invent a language
Which only you and I would understand.
Both of us would
Make sense of each other’s unspoken words
When we sail we
Shall travel to the future
By going back to our past.
We will reach the end
Of the very beginning.
We will begin from the very end.
Through us we will encapture life.
From us life will find the zenith
Of all its possibilities.
Let us begin then
From where we are not.
To reach
Where nobody thinks we can ever arrive at.
ICARUS
I have nothing much to say
A thousand nights follow
Each of my days.
Yes, I have occasional dreams of flight
But then, with my destination in sight
I fall heavy with grief
With invisible winds holding sway.
My heart is a red volcano
From which, words as magma flows away.
I sometimes wonder if I can paint with
My hollow words, Paint life with
As much vigour as a Matisse did in his day
And I strive for that Life, that intensity
In the light of all my dying days …
