✨ LATEST ISSUE •
From ULR
Issue 15 – REFUSE
The leaves, they wail all night & Other Poems
Poems, in Hindi and English, that move between an indictment of men who never learned to read a woman's heart and a tender accounting of friendship found in clouds, rain and wind. A meditation on what is studied and what is felt, and the intimacies that scholarship never touches.
Original Language:
The leaves, they wail all night
The lament of yellowed leaves
is the mournful vigil of the night. It isn’t visible.
But in sharp voices,
those leaves, scattered far along the paths, slowly inch closer to one another to tell their story… whimper
to say
why they broke and when they fell. The leaves they wail all night,
alone.
You men
You men—
Thinkers, philosophers,
theologists, sages!
You roving experts,
makers of language, makers of decisions. You roamed far and wide.
You interpreted
the expanse of the nations and the world. You learned
history geography
the business of numbers.
That is to say you learned
everything there was to learn
of the political order.
You did not deem necessary,
as a measure of your erudition,
to know
the heart of a woman.
You remained ignorant,
therefore.
You could not know
the science of intimacy of minds. You could not read
the minds closest to you —
a mother, a wife
a kin’s mind,
a daughter, a sister,
a sibling’s mind.
The mind of
a companion, your other half,
your friend.
Your roving mind
remained at a remove
from affection
from compassion.
Friends
My treasury has been ever abundant
with friends.
To God and solitude
I surrendered my joys and sorrows
and accepted the gift of creation.
From nature and light
I took for my share,
a sky with the sun, moon and the
stars.
Clouds and rain
remained my lifelong companions.
Clouds
that never strayed from me,
that neither altered their nature nor
colours, that neither vanished in the
crowd of the city, nor changed their
dwellings.
Wherever, however
I found them as they were.
The rain kept my melancholic
heart soaked
and under my feet,
the earth green.
Wherever fearless I bloomed,
I found friendship with the flowers
that blossomed each season
and transformed into fragrance.
I forged a bond with the winds
that never left me alone
but moved with me
clutching at my hem.
The universe, the winds,
the waters, fire and the earth,
held in an embrace,
my will to live.
Pramila Shankar
Dr Pramila Shankar occupies a prominent place among Rajasthan’s contemporary poetic voices. She completed her doctorate in 1996 on Women in India’s Regional Novels. Her first poetry collection, Kulīn Striyān (Cultured Women), was published in 2022 by Bodhi Prakashan. Her poems have been published on digital platforms such as Hindvi and Anjum. The three poems here are translated from her collection of poems Rāt Bhar Rotī Hain Pattiyā̃. These poems and others from the collection are a melodious confluence of diverse human experiences and verdant sensibilities of nature. They carry the timbre of nature’s five elements, the tender yet formidable lyricism of the feminine mind.
Aparna Mahiyaria
Dr Aparna Mahiyaria is a multi-disciplinary artist, writer and academic. In the past, she has worked as an editor at the Indian Cultural Forum where she produced a poetry series Bol. Aparna has translated works of eminent poets including Savita Singh, Manglesh Dabral, and Surinder Jaipal. Aparna currently works as a lecturer in drama at the University of Exeter. Her research examines the relationship between performance and politics in the context of street theatre in Delhi, and more recently, theatre’s encounters with law. She lives and works in Exeter, UK.