World Poetry Day Celebration
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World Poetry Day Celebration at Lampshade Writers
To celebrate World Poetry Day on 21st March, Lampshade Writers had an online poetry reading on 24th March (Sunday). Attendees could read their own poem or that of any other poet. Each recitation was followed by vibrant interactions.
Here are some of the poems that were written and recited by the attendees themselves:
Words Apart
By Varun Dhingra
Your words are many
Mine too few
Your tirades, a gushing lava
My rebukes, a settled due
Your sentences flow like swollen rivers
At the peak, of the monsoons
My alphabets appear after ages
Hidden Oasis, in a desert, of scorched silences
Your exhortations, too powerful to control
My musings, too humble to utter
Your speeches build empires, make histories
My disjointed thoughts, hide inside old books,
like fading myths
You scatter your words, to conquer the world
I swallow mine, to arrest its fall
You measure lives, in the balance of your words
I measure my words as if
lives hang in balance upon them
Your words are creation hymns, to new worlds
Mine, are silent prayers, to a wordless old god
We are words apart
you and me
Words may be your currency
But I know their value.
Haiku
By Srinivasa Rao Sambangi
Theme: Spring
spring rain
the whole sky
a garden sprinkler
***
spring morning
the gardener's neck
two inches longer
***
spring morning
the deadwood shines
with green moss
***
spring equinox
my father's selfie
in black and white
***
spring clouds
all shapes run
into horses
***
spring morning
the girl next door
prunes the boxwood fence
***
spring rain
umbrella swings
to her left to his right
***
spring moon
her appraisal rating
star studded
My Poetry
By Spondon Ganguli
The words of my poems have no boundaries
And they hop from thought to thought
Like a grasshopper hopping amidst green leaves.
Sometimes the words play hide and seek
Like the grasshopper hides beneath the green
Sometimes I get lost in my poems and find no way out
Till the grasshopper is walking across my notebook.
In my dark bedroom,
When I am sobbing into my pillow,
The fluorescent light of a thousand fireflies
Hidden in my poems
Keep me alive.
As a bright morning sky
Breaks through the longest dark night
To illuminate a new path,
I come to a new page for a new start.
The shadow of the night
Wiped away by the rays of sunlight
Keep hovering upon my young heart
In the fluffy clouds in search of fresh words.
Sometimes when challenges overcast success
Trap your soul beneath shivers,
Drizzled in the snowflakes of pain,
Poetry keeps the fire alive
When the sky suddenly goes dark
The letters and the words provide warmth and relief,
There is a new spring
After each snowfall.
And at the end of each poem,
I always get soaked in it
And at that moment, poetry wraps me
In the warm blanket of motherly care.
Reading you from the beginning to end
I travel through a sheath of emotions
The unspoken words embedded in my core
Discovering my joyous moment.
A Riot of Colours
By Atreya Sarma Uppaluri
(The poem has a significance about the colours of the festival Holi celebrated in March.
The reading out of this poem on 24th March 2024 was dedicated by the poet to Katragadda Ramachandra Rao, his dear friend for 53 years, who left for the heavenly abode the day before, on the night of 23rd March 2024.)
Green leaves
Gazing at red flowers—
Turn green with envy!
Red flowers
Eyeing yellow fruits—
Turn red with anger!
Yellow fruits
Seeing the green leaves—
Turn yellow with age!
White scowls at Black
And boasts:
“Look here, darkie!
I’m the light, I’m the purity.
You’re grimy and gloomy!”
Not to be outdone, Black taunts back:
“O wily White!
You’re full of pallor with no originality.”
“Hey, you, Brown,
In our estimate, you’re always down
Since you’re neither here nor there,”
Black and White vent their spleen.
Upon hearing it, bang launches Brown
An offensive in self-defence:
“I’m the colour of the earth
And of the creative world of wood.
Why! Aren’t your bread and bakes brown?
Then on your faces why that frown?”
The colours, thus, ran riot
And splashed and lashed—
To show their true colours,
As if they were in a world
That is coloured, and not colourful.
Suddenly then …
The quarrelling colours came to a halt
As an Oracle beamed across and reverberated:
“Hark, my dear ones, and mark my words.
You’re no foes to one another;
You’re siblings, the offspring of the Same.
Forget not that you’re all symbols of harmony.
Just look up, high up into your mirror!”
Illumining so, the Oracle vanished
Leaving all the colours lavished
With… the Divine Rainbow.
Originally published in Atreya Sarma Uppaluri's poetry collection 'Sunny Rain-n-Snow' (2016)
On the Edge of My Heart
By Harpreet M. Caur
On the edge of my heart
I heard a knock
On my forgotten pride,
I heard the knock.
on the past self-calling me
My Ego, my wounds,
I never opened.
Blank emotions,
My attitude,
of my unconscious mind.
You are a dream, reality,
or shadow of my soul.
I don’t know.
But I know this much.
My soul drowned in the tears of your love.
In my unconscious mind,
I kept my head On my lap.
Power of the Subconscious Mind
Endless fear churns my belly.
I heard a knock on the empty page
Of my life.
Subconscious
My battles and my scars
I heard a knock on my head.
Empty mind, triggering my mind,
My attitude, my ego,
I kept in the cage
The mirror showed me my face.
Ticking of the clock,
Tik Tok Tik.
I heard a knock on the box
that had my mind caged by society.
I heard a knock on the womb of my unborn child
Who is crying,
in the depth of my guts.
Back of my head
Roots of thoughts growing
from the inside of my head.
Brain nerves
Spreading on the Pages of my mind.
I question
the truth of my existence.
Lost in my thoughts,
I heard the knock on my thoughts.
My attitude melts into nothingness
inside me.
On my dying breath,
when I was least expecting one
I heard a knock on my long-buried grave
on my otherwise dead emotions.
Lost memories
On the other side of the world
From the border of the universe
The life I am living
I heard the knock
On my thoughts stream,
On my self-respect
My attitude, my past, my Ego,
and some vivid memories.
On the back of my eyelids
I heard a knock and followed it
to where it would lead me.
from the inside of my head
Pandora’s box of my mind
the inside of the treasure chest.
The day I became deaf.
Empty mind, giving it a trigger
my nostalgic self.
I heard the knock from the lost self
From the Freezer where
I kept the dead body Of my past.
I heard a knock
I heard the knock at my bleeding heart.
Who is there I wonder why?
Don’t stop
Passcode is love
Just whisper the magic word
And get inside.
“I am and I will wait for you, till the last breath my dear one.
Even after I perish into nothingness.”
Originally published in Harpreet Caur's poetry collection 'Rise of the Phoenix' , available on https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0C8GVDJ9R
Untitled Poem
By Riddhima Sen
Cage made of gold
I am trapped,
My wings are clipped
My deep pink feathers
Are covered in blood .
I cry out loud,
In pain and agony .
For how long could l smile?
Pretend to chirp and sing a merry song
When it's all dark
Down the alley
Missing Kolkata
By Patrichia Dcruze
Kolkata is old,
But yet beyond beautiful,
The walls might have washed,
Yet its colours remain,
Kolkata is that emotion,
Which deepens every moment,
No rare eye can see it,
But only the one,
That looks at it up close.
A Different Revolution
By Pranab Ghosh
That continues through ages, in spite of failures.
Revolution is the zeal to protest against tyranny,
Oppression, exploitation, against all that
Devalues humanity.
But what when failed revolution leads to social upheaval,
Death and anarchy? What when young
Men and women are crushed by the state
After being branded as anarchists?
Still you want to sing the song of revolution?
Dream of it?
Let there be an end to loses of human lives
And property. Let there be an end to violence.
Struggle can be peaceful even. Revolution can be
Humane too, where people transform their minds,
Revolutionize their souls to sing in unison for a
Better
Life
For
Man!
The above poem is part of the book of poems, Karma Cola, published by the UK-based Impspired.com in 2023 and is available on www.Amazon.co.uk.
***
Beautiful poems
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