Ka Khun kynthei! ka Khun kynthei!
Baroh ki ia Risa.
Kane Kein, ka nong pynroi pynpar.
Kan bteng ia u ‘sai syngkai.
mat Lah kut ! kane kaba khatduh.
Ki Ong ia ka ‘ phi dei ka Syiem’
Hynrei ka Syiem kaba rangli.
Ka Khun kynthei! ka Khun kynthei!
Baroh ki ia Risa.
Kane Kein, ka nong pynroi pynpar.
Kan bteng ia u ‘sai syngkai.
mat Lah kut ! kane kaba khatduh.
Ki Ong ia ka ‘ phi dei ka Syiem’
Hynrei ka Syiem kaba rangli.
Armed with this array of impulses, we learnt uneasily,
to live with each other, with songs and dance to gel
this newfound togetherness,
but always fearful that like licks of fire that vapourise
into the night,
we will be forgotten.
it takes a second to turn a grown woman into a heap of sandterribly afraid of disappearing We are sitting there chatting about theatre and…
For the Imprisoned I want to gift all of this to you the silence, the wind the freedom of walking I want to tuck…
Translated from Axomiya by Biswajit K. Bora. (1) What do I do with these corpseshalf buried in front of me on the banks of the…
Nga dei u syntiew ha ki khlaw ka jinglong khynnah jong nga,
Nga dei ka kshaid ha ki riat ka jinglong samla jong nga,
Nga dei ka diengsoh ha kyrpong iing ki khun jong nga,
Nga dei ka khla ha ka pyrthei ka jinglong tymmen jong nga.
I am the orchid in the forest of my childhood,
I am the waterfall on the precipice of my youth,
I am the fruit tree in the garden of my children,
I am the tigress of the winter of my life
The nation is not a map
drawn on a piece of paper
so that even if an edge frays
the remaining parts stay intact;
and rivers, mountains, cities, villages
hold fast to their places
unperturbed.
If this is not your belief,
Then I do not want to live
with you.
Born Rosemary Kikon, in Kohima, Nagaland, rōzumarī saṃsāra’s poems are autobiographically inspired by being born and bred Naga in a woman headed and women only household
Whenever someone talks about
the ‘national unity’ of the entire country
my heart wishes to
deflate their balloons of vanity
and tell them—
the meaning of Bharat
is not related to some Dushyanta*;
rather it lies in the fields
where food grows
and so do robbers.
Kabiranjan Saikia, popularly known as Swadhinata Phukan who was the Assistant Publicity Secretary of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA). Although Swadhinata Phukan was a member of the civil wing of the banned outfit, he was gunned down in a fake encounter by the state police on the night of 26 May 2000 at Garumara in the Jorhat district of Assam. He was 26 at that time. These two poems by Kabiranjan Saikia – “Aartonador Enixa” [“A Night of Screams”], written on 29 February 1992 and “Xamprotik” [“Nowadays”], written on 18 February 1993 – are sourced from an anthology of his poems, Moi Kabiranjan Uttopto Hobo Khuja Eta Kobitar Naam [I Am Kabiranjan, the Name of a Poem Wanting to Erupt], published by Aank-Baank in 2011.
KA ÏING KHOM IEW HA BARIK
Da lah kyntiew
yn sa ieng kum u mot bah
ka ing tep ba ramhah kynsha
ba mih tyrpeng ba pyiar
ban kajoh ban dem sdien da jingsngewrain
ha ki biar, ki dak thoh kin khih kyrbeit
sha ki kyrteng jong ki paidbah…
A SHOPPING MALL IN BARIK
When it rises
it will stand like a large tomb
A monstrous mausoleum
with shoulders stretched
long enough to hang in shame
on its walls, alphabets will assemble
into the names of the people…
If instead of being hanged by the neck
you’re thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, your people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won’t say,
“Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag” —
You’ll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it’s your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.
In sad times one does not write poems
but does whole lot of other things
from cracking jokes to gulping poison
but one does not write poems
Earth’s been around the Sun. Kashmir, where it was, in darkness
While tyrants spin untruths, enact laws in darkness
I forgot to sanitise my hand because love taught me to reach out without thinking twice. My mask came off because reflex taught me to…
#Poetry #Axomiya #RashmirekhaBorah
“Without any of us beholding
A forest is walking alongside the multitude heading home in throngs
Without any of us knowing
The blood oozing from their torn toe nails keeps marking the path”
I’ve often been invited to strange places
To keep in company with strange people.
Or, it may be truer to say I am the strange one in all that
I am the unknown usually among the known faces
As we all sit there talking poetry
First always is the introduction
And some, though already known,
For fear we may miss out on any detail
Start shooting off long lists of books and awards
And important journals-domestic and foreign
I always dreaded my turn…
Translation and Commentary by Nabina Das Nabina Das is a poet and writer based in Hyderabad. Assamese poet Nilim Kumar recently published a poem Ekhon Asustha…
We make tiktok, memes,
dalgona coffee and chicken dry fry.
We sons of bitches are doing fine.
We write rain-poems, sing songs,
paint pictures and hold online Bihu;
curse the useless prime minister
at eight in the evening
and fuck at midnight and high noon.
We sons of bastards are doing fine.
Two poems by Kabiranjan Saikia/Swadhinota Phukan, a revolutionary poet from Assam who was killed by Indian state in a false encounter on 26th May 2000.
Translations by Arunabh Konwar
Daily we gulped down the alcoholic news
of roasted cars and brutalised bodies, fleeing
families and flimsy appeals for peace, curfew
reliefs, temporal windows for resupply, while
at home we gossiped about spilled blood
between endless games of scrabble, our tones
hushed lest the police patrolling sanitised streets
would hear and accuse us of plotting. That year,
with winter fast approaching with no sign
of school reopening, I learnt the vocabulary
of hate and placed my preadolescent signature
on a certificate that declared my neighbour
and friend, Abhijit, his family, had become
our enemy.
I ask, will you come to my funeral?
You ask, will you come if I die?
I will come before you die.
As your masked relations mill about
like carrion birds,
ready to take you away
“Ernesto Cardenal, the renowned poet and Roman Catholic cleric who became a symbol of revolutionary verse in Nicaragua and around Latin America, and whose suspension from the priesthood by St. John Paul II lasted over three decades, died March 1, 2020. He was 95.
RAIOT remembers Cardenal via two piracies. First, an interview on Liberation Theology and second, his most famous poem ORACIÓN POR MARILYN MONROE / PRAYER FOR MARILYN MONROE
Raashid Maqbool – poet, teacher, scholar, journalist, friend-recited this ghazal to me in late December 2019 in his dusty car, parked on the side of a main thoroughfare in Srinagar, Kashmir. We had only an hour ago driven by a macabre spectacle: a young man, no more than 25 years of age, was being dragged by his long hair, his body bouncing against the rutted road as he flailed and kicked in protest.
The black and yellow share taxis still ply,
The shops stay open past nine,
The walls are void of graffiti that say
We are Khasi by blood, Indians by accident. But
The walls, they are still covered with lime:
Poor republic labours
And asks for two handfuls of rice-
They find jaat paat under republic’s lungi.
Lonely republic’s
Hunger burns in republic’s stove.
Republic is lame and maimed
Someone crushes republic in a mortar’s nook.
I never learnt Jana Gana Mana.
Every Independence Day was our annual celebration
As a day of burning flames and protests,
A day of complete shutdown.
Each day, a day of murder, a day of rape
A day when crimson tears fell on each memory’s hearth
My heart never could feel the love for Jana Gana Mana
This anthem did not bear the name of my land
Nor the names of my rivers, my hills.
There was a parking lot in Shillong
that took a year and crores to build.
Why, I asked, was it not used to ease congestion?
It awaited the Minister for Roads to inaugurate,
who awaited the fall of his government.
And the waiting goes on,
for here they change parties and governments
like Hindi film stars changing dresses in a song.
My familiarity with the Shillong hills is not new. Probably Shillong will remind you of Amit and Labanya of ‘Sesher Kobita’ (the last poem). But however great a poet Rabindranath may be, there is no fitting image of Shillong in ‘Sesher Kobita’. The reason for this is that he never developed a kinship with Shillong. However, Rabindranath being an intelligent person, by naming it ‘Sesher Kobita’ he meant it to be a poem rather than a novel. If someone wants to write a novel, one cannot do it by excluding the inhabitants of Shillong, especially hill tribes like the Khasis. In his description and in the treatment, there is absolutely no flavour of Shillong.
The demand for Hindi
is now a demand
for better treatment–
not rights-
put by the agents
to their slave-masters.
They use Hindi in place of English,
while the fact is
that their masters
use English in place of Hindi-
the two of them have struck a deal.
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Thinking about yet another mass murder of innocents and a frightened, hate-filled man who proudly dons the mantle of ‘heroic defender of white people’. In his effort to protect the white race Brenton Tarrant has stupidly only succeeded in further darkening the growing stain of shame that increasingly covers so much of the pale skinned fraternity.I am a white person. I am a male. Together these two accidents of birth have placed me at the very bullseye of privilege
Prospective Immigrants Please Note
Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.
If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.
Everything will be okay tomorrow
Tomorrow everything will be okay
Tomorrow the great media will
Deliver the propaganda pizza
Tomorrow everything will be okay
After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
For all that he had written there will be no posthumous award for Phrangsngi of the green house. You see only the well-connected shine and speak, even from their graves, to those giving awards.
He smiles
he laughs
through the bars
to shake me up
from my early morning dreams
with a hug
of a good morning
clanking a huge bunch of keys
into the cage of my life sentence.
The feeling sank into my stomach like a stone. This wasn’t the city of my childhood vacations anymore. Had I grown up so quickly as to quietly absorb this pinching away of the dearest part of my treasure of memories? Or was this gross erasure an external change taking everything and everyone over elsewhere as well as in the city? I wasn’t so corrupted with knowledge then as now. As any child of eleven, I too didn’t bother to explain or philosophise. I only felt the difference with my senses: the cattle-touched smell of earth was gone; and it had taken with it a school-ridden child’s hyacinth and vine-covered paradise of her imagination and escape. I had lost something irretrievably. And it wasn’t even my fault.
You are told you write depressing poetry
You answered “The trick is to read newspapers incessantly”
You didn’t tell them “The trick is to feel every death in your bone”
The familiar blackout is not because of load shedding, now it is your choice because electricity is prepaid.
In another time I am sure
they’ll treat you with electricity
coursing your skin or maybe they did.
There are political rights; a government is set up in the land. Democracy functions with total success. An election is held every five years. But for the people in this land there are no names. So for the nameless citizens the nameless representatives govern the land of the half-humans. Because whether to give human names to the head or to the body — no one can decide. A land such as this is very much in the news, a land much talked about.
Members of my father’s house, languages mix like the marriage of clattering utensils. Members of the house, you folded your mats and gave yourself up to another religion. Members of the house, let us not pretend that we are one thing and one thing alone. Together we brewed in the cauldron of that kitchen or have you chosen to forget? We will never be just one thing again. Never again will there be enough to burn to purify the impure in us.
Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, artist and author of the autobiographical Finding My Way (2016), found himself at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London speaking on 21 June at a seminar on “Indigenous Media, Self-Determination and Cultural Activism”. This poem came to him then as he first typed out Hindi in Roman script on his phone and sent it to his friend and accomplice S. Anand, publisher at large at the small Navayana. Anand felt impelled to find the words in English just like he did when working with Venkat on his autobiography. Venkat’s work has been exhibited worldwide, including at Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, in 2013.
My mother is a woman with ten tongues
That is why she raves incessantly
Unmindful whether it’s day or night!
I run from home to bazaar
Muddle-headed on lanes and streets
Like an owner-less dog;
When I returned she fumed again
“Offspring of sin why don’t you die
At least other children die by swallowing poison”,
I became so angry my blood boiled,
From my heart my pulse bounced in and out.
No one goes to Iewduh, now burning.
“Too crowded, eww”, they say.
Dirty and living, too like OUR city.
We are non-tourists,
It’s not even famous on Instagram!
Five days my city burns
And the non-tourists have disappeared.
Kashmir is burning too.
Where will you go now?
Fucking tourists!
This is the best time to read Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s poem Sundori, while we sit amidst angers, rumours and curfews in Shillong. Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih is the key Khasi modern poet whose rooted yet critical verses uncover the unsaid of Khasi society. Sundori was written during the troubles of 1990s when the local nationalist anger and resentment was at its peak.
A Poem for the Cruel Majority
Today the cruel majority vote to enlarge the darkness.
They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds
Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass.
The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel majority.
Hail to the cruel majority!
Hail! hail! to the cruel majority!
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