The Cauldron 8th
| Cauldron |
Cauldron| Cauldron } 8th | |||||
|EDITORIAL|
It pays to be a poet.
you don't have to pay prostitutes. Marie has spiritual thingummies. - Eunice de Souza (1940–2017) The 8th edition of The Cauldron is dedicated to Eunice de Souza. We celebrate her for her provocative verses.
|ARTICLE|
LETTER TO JULY
Isha Lahiri
Dear July,
The world has taken a toll on me. There have been countless
instances of rainy days, flooded roads and staying at home. Quite often, you
bring cloudy days with you, but I will not complain. It has been a tough year
since we last met. I have decided to move out of this city, you see. I want to
start anew July, I want to feel the fresh air and get away. I will not lie but
yes, I will miss this city immensely. But July, if I need to find myself again,
I need to do this.
Over the past year, July, I have learned to accept myself
the way I am. I can never say that I am flawless but yes I am trying to change.
I know its easier said than done but hey I am really trying this time and not
just complaining about things. I have grown fond of listening to old music
these days. I listen to music on cassettes and it’s sad people do not do it
anymore. Yeah I know, we have to be progressive and change with times.
However, July, it’s funny how we can turn the pages of a calendar to the month
we want, change the time in our wristwatches but we cannot really travel to
that moment in the future or in the past. It is really scary how swiftly time
flies. I have met you seventeen times in my life but it’s interesting how I had
to introduce myself every time we did. I still remember that day, eight years
ago, when I went out with Satyasikha, had a lot of ice cream and visited the
marble palace. Do you remember July? Do you remember how you couldn’t stop the
clouds from breaking then?
Things have really changed July. I have apparently grown up.
But what is growing up July? Getting your own driving license? Owning your own bank account? Or is it
becoming a skilled actor off stage and hiding everything from people because of
the overwhelming fear of judgement. Is it wrong July, to cry about the cookie
your brother stole from the jar that day? Is it really humiliating to admit
that I am scared of the dark, just because I am an adult today?
Dear July, I do not know when I grew out of my habit of
playing with building blocks and dolls. I do not know what growing up means.
However here’s the thing, July. You have been my truest confidante for years
now. You bring this air of melancholic happiness, every time you come around.
Your dark eyes offer me the solace, the brutish summers take away. When the
gloom descends on cloudy evenings, how I long to be with you, alone and
pensive. I will always need your company July. I will always need that dull
smile of yours to feel a little a live again.
From
The girl with the blue
umbrella
|POETRY|
Urvashi Mukherjee
The streets are a mosaic
of yellow and blue.
Smoke rises from the open
fires in makeshift-hearths and makeshift-eyes,
It billows out
And fills the empty
spaces of the twilight...
The air is thick with
prayer -
(It curls out from the
depths of cool, green mosques built by some forgotten emperor to match the jade
of his beloved's glance) -
It licks it's way
Into the smoking pots and
pans of the faithful
Into the smouldering
desire of the infidel.
Across the haze of
diffused neon and prayer and ittar-sprinkled delicatessen vendors -
A jafri-window twinkles,
Trapping the blue of the
night
In its criss-cross
weaves.
Perhaps, within its
invisible depths
Some forgotten
Scheherezade sits
Perfuming her hair
with the leftover dreams
Of young lovers
Who've traced patterns on
her skin all night.
How many make love to her
limbs?
How many make love to her
lips?
How many to the faint
smell of spices that linger on her breasts
and seep from her skin
into the little shuttered room (long forgotten)?
Tha jade from her eyes,
brims over
And trickles onto the
street
Shading the slivers of
night, and prayer, and love.
(The wise, old men say
They've seen her pass
this way
Some evenings,
Some autumns,
Some memories,
Ago.)
Baidurya Bose
Big Gape
I'm hunting, you know I'm
on the field
Circular, sometimes
diminished to hell
Rectangular, it's not
heaven though
The field of mind and
souls
Where to go? Let me
rather sit on a cartwheel and think of my merry days
I am thinking to share
that with the cow-man
He said he's two kids and
a lovely rainy wife!
Oh that's beautiful!
Where?
Fragments, nothingness
cuts through this unconditional happiness
But hope smokes smilies
and rants about nothingness eventually
This is circular, it
gyrates and create gyres
Continues --
The night snorts as if
it's happy
Beside, beneath, into the
abyss
Of this unknown Gothic
pleasure
Eerie and gibbous Spring
taunts
And twists his wintry
scales and smirks and winks
Look, the night snorts!
Motion is again reviving
Steps walk black into the
bluest chambers .. I know where.. I won't tell you
You bother , bother
yourself with multitudes!
Incarcerated blind
mozaics
Where Queens dance with
imprisoned wings
Rub your spineless head
and walk back
It is a big yawn!
I am hunting you know
And slow breeze blows,
waterdrops giggles
At your slow pace, at me!
But I am hunting, with
mouth watching
With eyes talking,
obviously invisible
I have known one thing
That gape is hanging even
On your childhood
mountain top
And that pulls you with
every single drop
I am just above the
zenith
Striving to hunt outside
this gaping yawn!
Cakes and forlorn!
Nightmare
Fragile sea, incumbent
ancient tree
A coxcomb of memory
Jazz food and amnestic
books
Fluttering wings of
moonlit hooks
Those hang me and you
And footsteps those sleep
on misery
"You egg",
these foolish rebukes
I make!
You grin with yellow
penury on your teeth
Engraved thoughts of a
barren heath
Yes, you wear a tie and a
suit
With a pilfered boot,
don't be rude
With that docile look,
look at you fool
You play guitar as if
it's a tool!
Easy as othello,
imperfect video zone
Gibbous motors of silent
rotators
They want to convey....
bluish and grey
Not too fast, not too
slow
Here's a stubble without
a bow
Ah, after long such a
scenario!
Talking banners gaze at
me
Every evening as I walk
on the streets
Open windows gulp in
jealousies
Rotten smell of fallen
fruits
Eaten by the laughing
city
Senile juices flowing out
and in!
Run with dogs, do not
whimper
Or sigh or drink or fake
hot temper
Ebb and flow of white
bulb lyrics
Has no music, some just pennyless
Frolic
Oh how I wish they sang
Cleopatra-Antonio
But damn these cajole,
quickly roll,
Run from this bent city
Look behind, your nemesis
and Apocalypse ...
Aparajita Dutta
When
the Sunset...
When the
sunset rained
And infused a
dragon into the wilderness,
There,
Oh beloved, we
met,
Smoking
marijuana
they sold it
as insurance.
Berserk, we
looked for colours,
Palpating in a
delirious odour,
Red, saffron,
green.
Hush !! Hush
!! Hush!!
Listen,
someone’s crying.
A plaintive
roar;
They want you
to kiss me.
The sunset lay
recumbent;
Upon the
vermilion they raped,
Cursed,
enforced the loitering love.
Our smoke
penetrated into the redness;
Embroiling
theories and emotions;
I gasped for
breath in the mist,
You had my
hands tied.
A kinky
fantasy.
The last drop
of the sunset is now our precarious affair;
The horizon
upholds insurgences,
They have come
in numbers;
The colours
smudge my eyes.
Oh beloved!
Take the acid and brush my eyelids;
Let’s be blind
ourselves
And my heart
will not think anymore!!
I miss you
In the smell
of my isolated curls;
they treasure
your fragrance,
the one that
weaves
your passion
and diligence,
sweat
sweetening the earthly disruptions.
I miss you
when my words
Desert me to
collect oysters,
colour of ruby
steals pearls;
I feel the cry
of your books,
Waiting like
me
in the flux of
our fate.
Shells catch
sun dolls.
We see a
flying bird
searching for
her wings.
The mirror
said,
My name
and wingless
stated my
void,
a restlessness
painting
another
reality,
I wish could
be ours.
I miss you
when they talk
of rings and bangles;
my wrist loses
its gravity;
my heart beats
for the hour,
each beat
reminding me,
I have
survived
for the
promised land.
I miss you,
because it's
not love;
because you
are the reason
I Exist!
Would I care
for evenings
like this,
my trepid
heart basks in
Storm,
I see you
smiling
where worlds
collide
and a deluge
is
Deconstructed?
Perhaps, it's
more than
a
transcendence,
a care that
swallows
moments;
Perhaps it's
yet to be coined
as the storm
bows down
upon your
sword;
I saw my
reflection in the storm,
The reflector
in the reflected
and that's how
that word was
born!!
Jizel crawls
up to my bed
Like a
sunflower
Showering myth
On lazy days
across the lake.
We talk,
Broken,
chopped, minced talks
Carelessly
sabotaging
An unruly love
making.
A light hid us
Scents
performed
Our fantasy.
Taniya Chakraborty
splintered glass
settling splintered glass
my hands were slit
I observed through the orifice
the body is a quasivoid
that for existences
is scaring an earthlike ellipsoid
of submersing it in darkness
illusion
for you touched — increscent upon the touch
I have risen from the water to the body
an ogre has entered the body
a god has entered the body
from the body exude together god and ogre—
adding to subtract
the flower blooms to wither…
ogre
they say every day he unleashes
awful phallic disdain!
cursed by the woman’s vagina
weeping, he will create a river without shores
and find his religion merely once!
then death will come about through his contagion,
we may offer them only compassion
some money, food or mere clothing
given more
they become ogres
fate
body that has desired body
when whole
myriad giraffes tug at leaves
a reptile’s tail drops
the instant when sowing ends
body is named soul
pea seed
this small family
lonesome pea seed
lying beside soft torrents of water
grant complete ecstasy divine being
they move gently upon the table
this small family
elusive pea seed
a girl in a torn blouse
is
scratching her belly—
Translations: Inam
Hussain
|STORY|
Garble
Rochelle
Potkar
The sculptor had a
clear voice when he was 20, and newly beginning the art of shaping and molding,
as a mentee, still on a tangent from the world’s definitions of success and
progress. Still when his diction was sharp, he sculpted masks, busts, models, statues, figures and figurines in metal,
wood, terracotta, marble, and granite. He carved waves in tresses, oceans in
faces, spins in galaxies of human forms.
#
But soon one day he
stopped talking. His voice went into a monosyllabic grunt, then a disgruntled cough.
People around
asked his curators, gallerists, art festival directors, critics for what had
gone wrong. How were they even to speak to him? His answers were garbled
between Hindi and English, but generally indecipherable.
Soon they
understood a tangent had gone too far. What came out was one startling
sculpture after another: alabaster panels that stopped onlookers in their strides,
clay statutes that spoke of worlds unspoken….
When the
middle-aging sculptor opened his mouth to speak of his Medusa, Saraswati, Ganga,
or Teesta, it was one discordant stream of sound. They led him further to
doctors, speech therapists, psychotherapists, and counselors.
But nothing
changed. He only shook his head with every suggestion. This refraction too far
from the incident.
Only he knew he was
courting posterity, whispering to echoes in stone, wax, wood, and metal.
He had traded with
a lurking shadow when he began, asking these questions again and again.
He had called it
upon himself. What will happen to my art
in the future? What will happen?
Will
they see the global light of globalization? Or remain in a small village, lost by
the sea?
#
The shadow traded.
‘Put something inessential on mortgage,’ it whispered sharply.
He gave up his
voice to save his vision.
“Let there be
sound.”
It took away the
noise.
“Let there be
voice.”
It took away
language.
#
When the sculptor
died, he had 50 sculptures across avant-garde galleries, exhibitions and world
museums. Also, miniaturized into memorabilia-merchandize, pen holders, fridge
magnets, and regaled of in glossy brochures. Curated over the internet, given a
deep sense of retrospective both by curators and punters.
#
Years later, the
watchful-dead sculptor saw his sculptures cut the linear lines of time. The concentric
circles of existence, ceasing, turning spiral, returning to infinity.
All had caught on
to his art.
Students studied
it. It was trickling down the next generation.
His silence
substituted by hundreds of interpretations, either downplayed or exaggerated. In
most cases, missing the point. His point gone into a blind-spot of new meaning.
But the world
celebrated each of his sculpture for its own reasons.
#
And he now had his
sound back.
The lingering
ageless shadow having returned it as promised.
From his abdominal
cavity, thoracic grid it now blew like gust through leaves and trees. He
sculpted hurricanes, dust storms, clouds aping all dear to him, in a world of
steel, clay, stone.
But what was
redeeming was he had saved his soul.
Senselessness was another
voice, too.
|
refreshing work by budding poets , congrats everybody , glad to read
ReplyDelete