म एक प्रेमी हुँ
I am a lover.
Whenever I walk onto a book store, the very first thing I do is go to the poetry section. I pick a random book and flip onto a random page. Looking for a sign of love. I am always in search of a good poetry , because I believe it is a message from a distant lover, friend, ancestors, family or even God which has travelled across 7 seas and the atmosphere and has finally landed into my hands.
Truly, madly, deeply.
From the very first moment I was consciousness of my capability to love someone, I found myself loving passionately, melancholically, dramatically just as I am writing this right now.
Growing up in a patriarchal world, mens emotional world is usually projected upon women . So, in my world too, woman showing emotions specially that relating to love and longing was a sign of being out of control or a sign of not being a dignified woman. Emotions were always a sign of weakness. To express this yearning for love, grief, passion and pain, I started writing poetries. I stated them into short verses . I go back to these poems and find them super cringy but also very satisfying (because I still hesitate to feel the deep passion that lies in my heart) and a part of me did!!!
Below is a short poetry I wrote as a teenager about being in LOVE.
When you stop looking for love in faces
Love comes to you in a time very fragile
Love is a person
Love is you
My stories that are ballad to your ears
A ballad of emotions
I know it break your heart a little
But you stay and love stays
Cause love is you.
Once in a lifetime
this feeling Is blind
But I see in colors
Red blue orange and black
I know sometimes It gets heavy
Trying to change or chase
The way the way love embosses you
And how love mobs the water running Down Your cheeks
When you blush slightly
Cause now love makes you laugh.
Take it from a person who LOVE has hurt
Cause LOVE is also a weapon
It’s naive and timid
It’s a rare species
It’s tender and sweet and bitter to leave.
Love is where my poetry started.
Hiding the yearning for love is where the wound lies. It feels like the solitude of a moonless night out in the breezy ocean. Poetry, an antidote. It makes you pause to sink into the hurt that we all store in boxes as we move from one place to another, one home to another. It opens up the tiny muscles, so you can breathe a little deeper into the flow and supply of unconditional love that is you. Poetry is the language of love; it is nature herself. In the language of the flutter of the trees, in the starry sky, in the currents of the waterfall, in the clouds drifting by, in the sun setting, in the birds flying with your laughter, in the painful cries, in the silence of the grief, and all the ways the universe exists in between you and I. In the ordinary moments of life, I extend my ears to listen to it more deeply, to find something magical and mysterious. For me being present with life is where greatness resides and in this moments poetry comes forth. This is me sharing the greatness of the manifestation of love, between the sun and the moon, the earth and the sky, the day and the night, Krishna and Radha.
The is me seeking intimacy with life through poetry, extending out like the wide arms of the earth in form of connecting hearts. I stand on the other end of your phone call, listening and talking. Brining pieces of poetries, phrases, quotes, pictures that has travelled through space to get to me so I can make it whole. Just like the full circle of the earth around the sun ,a round clock, the phases of the moon and a complete thought. Expressing and recieving the beauty of life through you so that we can start to heal in the eternal here and now.
