Taseer Gujral
~ incipience ~
the place i come from
does not exist anymore
it was a soluble continent
a filigree of gold and green
fed by a maze of five rivers
it survived the wounds of a land divided
and a savage holocaust
only to hear the sufi lament of waris
surface again today
i can hear the strains of heer
wafting on a bloodied Chenab
perhaps my motherland
lies sunken somewhere underneath
my feet are sprouting roots
i want to soak all my angst
to nurture a lost dream
that once belonged to my people
i belong to a mist that rises like florescence
and spreads on a lost city
while I learn the art of balance
~ coming home ~
i could drink the sun
i could traipse over haloed light
framing flowering mango trees
i could scrunch over carpets
of fallen teak leaves lining the sides
of an autumnal road in spring
i could also drink in a sweet flow
words strung together like
wayward embroideries
in Punjabi –
an adaptation of Pushkin’s poem
it seems like a lifetime
of being away
i am still stringing my sitar
to embrace the other nishad
perhaps
i could render to perfection, raag desh
on the cusp of
an imminent return
~ I write ~
only mad people write postcards
these days, you smile
and come alive on the grainy surface
of my black and white asylum
i continue to scrawl memories
till a field of saffron breathes on it
and a quaint shikara with a red canopy
floats on its words
you then fade away
with the saffron
and the shikara
my eyes are glazed
only mad people write postcards these days
Taseer Gujral studied literature and received a doctorate on the feminist poems of Adrienne Rich. Her published works appear in The Sunflower Collective, Coldnoon Diaries, Muse India, Open Road Review, E3W Literature, Destiny to Write anthologies and Indian Express. Her interests are quite eclectic, and range from writing, sketching, singing and listening to music to feeling the moist soil between her fingers while gardening, spotting and trying to identify birds and dwelling on the aesthetics of serving tea in porcelain. She has lived in several parts of India, and now resides with her family in her hometown of Chandigarh