My Father Speaks of Poetry
by Amlanjyoti Goswami
At some point you must start writing
About the intensity of feeling
A theme for life
Perhaps civilisation, where things can be.
Yeats for example, how he made word and deed one.
Or Blake, who burnt London with feeling.
You must go beyond experience
To the missing heart of things.
I listen with care
Trying to make out every word
From a feeble muffled mouth
That has known age and illness like a companion.
Don’t turn up like Eliot in coat and tie
And call yourself a poet.
He couldn’t go beyond the wasteland
Because the war came, through the open door.
But you are writing from locale
From a spirit of things
And now you must go beyond
Venture into history and lore, myth and time.
I nod, knowing this is impossible
As playing with fire or staying up all night
Finding him the food he loves
With names like bhedelilota and noroxingho.
Things no poet or editor would understand
Unless I make them whole and paste them
On fine mortar and pestle into a dark curry
Filled with ravages of time, the dark of civilisations.
The passage of day is marked with a good meal
While ambition grows thinner with each passing day.
This weight feels like the mountain of a moment.
The moment is all I know, I want to tell him.
There’s no past and the future is yet to come.
But it feels like stepping into shoes too large to wear.
I try skipping barefoot.
I remove my socks of worry.
I feel a poem coming
Through the foggy air
Like a meandering airplane of the dark night
Just before the nurse says dinner.
Amlanjyoti Goswami has written three books of poetry, A Different Story, Vital Signs and River Wedding, published by Poetrywala. River Wedding was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi award from the National Academy of Letters in India. A Different Story won the first runner up award for poetry at The Wise Owl Literary Awards. He has published widely in journals and anthologies across the world, including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Penguin Vintage, Simon and Schuster, Anthropocene, Rattle and Sahitya Akademi. He is also a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. His work has appeared on street walls of Christchurch, buses in Philadelphia, exhibitions in Johannesburg and an e-gallery in Brighton. He has reviewed poetry for The Hindu, Frontline, Review 31 and Modern Poetry in Translation among others. He translates poetry from Assamese, Bangla and Hindi into English and some of his poems have been translated from English into Assamese, Hindi, Punjabi and German. He has read at various places, including Delhi, Mumbai, New York, Chandigarh, Boston and Bangalore. His next book will be a sequence of poems about his recently departed father, and it will explore grief, longing and bereavement as well as myth, memory and community. He grew up in Guwahati and lives in Delhi.