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Protest Poetry

This month's poet Chandramohan S writes about struggles of the marginalized

POETRY EDITOR ANANYA S GUHA's note:

Here in the poetry of Chandramohan S  we get more than a sampling of protest poetry. The question is whether such poetry is time bound? Chandramohan works a reality effect into these poems, with a grim satire. Poetry as the Argentinian poet Nicholas Gullen has shown, can be brusque, direct and unsentimental. Chandramohan weaves such flavour into his direct and brazen poetry.
 

Poem 1


I am Chinki How are you?

My mother

I have seven mothers

 seven sisters

Their crimson tethered to the Indian standard time

And handcuffed with anti –sedition laws

Questions like “Do you eat snakes”

Sting in a flash from my footprints wherever I go

Frigid entry points,

Fault lines on the skeleton of a nation healed wrongly

A dislocated joint

In the wounded conscience of a nation .


 

Poem 2: Protest Poem against recent supreme court judgement.

 

Section 377 beneath the leaves of grass

 

An antique fence of demarcation

on the cemetery of love dreams 

 

coffins down lowed

beneath the ground

 

dreams closeted

below the heart

 

The names on the tombstones,

tales of camaraderie laid to rest

read like posthumous gallantry award list.

 

the ray of hope

on the grass of time

as leaves of grass engulf the names on tombstones

in a toppling of time.

 

Falling in love is a revolutionary act

Consummation is a posthumous honor.!

 

NOTE: Walt Whitman's poems titled Leaves of Grass on queer love has inspired this poem and there is an oblique reference to it.



Poem 3.

(None of the Above NOTA)

The bullets from the Maoists and the CRPF

burned a NOTA shaped hole

in the ballots of the tribals.

 

Poem 4.


History

Lynched pages of history are glued together,

they hinge on the swords.

My poems try to split those pages apart

without crimsoning the edges.


Chandramohan.S1 Posts

is an English poet based in India. His poems reflect the socio-political struggles of the marginalized , the working class and the nomadic  outcasts  of the World who are victimized and then forgotten as nations clash and wage relentless war. His work has been profiled in New Asia Writing ,Mascara Literary Review and About place journal.