World Poetry Day Celebration

 

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

Revolution is a process, a march, a promise
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.

***