DesiPundit

The Lady makes a case for confusion in a short, bittersweet poem.

We spend our lives looking for answers,
Because we think the next answer will change something,…

By an ancient river meandering through an old city
Every once in a while
Wandering souls will pause,
In a timeless moment of togetherness.

Anil pens a short and sweet ode to the Taj Mahal.

Sayesha reinterprets the poet Kabir’s dohas, or rather condenses his dohas into snappy one-liners. For all you fans of Kabir, and all those who have never had a chance to read Kabir, this is a must read.

Keson kahan bigadia, je mooned sau baar
Man ko kaahe na moondiye, jaamein vish hai vikaar

Rough translation: What harm have the hair done, that you shave them a hundred times?
Why not shave your mind, which is filled with poisonous thoughts?

Executive summary: Think positive.

Chennai Ramblings beautifully describes a relationship gone bad.  Lovely verse.

Mayhap I faltered somewhere
When I told you
That I loved words
Any of them, all of them;
Forgetting that you were a magician
A Byron, Shelley, Keats and Tennyson
Rolled into one

Sadly, the poet seems to have taken a break from blogging.   But you will find other beautiful poems in his archives.

Anitha pens a sweet and touching poem on moving from an old home.

The feast is over,
we tell the silverfish
and we raise a storm
of cleaning,
scouring old scars
that won’t go away
with the trickle
of tears…

temporal has a heart-wrenching poem describing a silent, hapless spectator in a hospital.

the patient is slipping,
will not see another dawn
if i speak up now
wailing will start
if i hold my peace

the night in quiet
will pass

There’s a triolet competition over at ammani’s place. What’s a Triolet?

It’s a short 8-line poem in which the first two lines are repeated as the last two lines and the first line is also line 4. Lines 3 and 5 rhyme with line 1. Line 6 rhymes with line 2. It will all become much more clear with this…

Oh, and this isn’t free. Be prepared to fork out an entry fee with a difference!

Here, Guide isn’t a Dev Anand
film, but a word (with an anaconda air
Of authority) that refers to the man
Playing scrabble with her phd dreams.
Here, supervisor means overseer,
(the slave-era sound intact)
Whose classes she can handle,
Whose kids she cannot.

Meena writes about tough lessons learned at university.

Annie writes an elegy for Keshav Vishwakarma, who tried to prevent three men from molesting a woman in Surat and was burnt alive by the molesters.

Keshav, if you knew (did you?) what they’d do
Perhaps you’d have shut up and let it be
Some insults, a woman – it happens all the time
Harassment and women – like sand and sea.

You see, we women rarely bother ourselves
We’ve learnt to shut up and stay shut; some say
Our eyes are glazed with the cataract of silence
We’re told, to live safe, there’s no other way.

Bikerdude compiles the poetry(?) that has been handed down through generations of children. If his verses were not hilarious enough, the comments section has even more hilarious ones!

Once I went to a Chinese Shop
There I saw a chinese lady
This what she said to me:
“Aye aye chick-a-dye
Um pum poori
Out goes you
And that is you.”