Web Exclusives - Poetry
100 Great Indian Poems is a collection spanning three millennia and twenty-eight of India's languages, and includes poems that will be unknown to the most avid readers, as well as work by writers familiar to the world.
Edited by Abhay K. and available from 10 February 2018, 100 Great Indian Poems is published by Bloomsbury India and available on Amazon.
This piece is derived from Jeongshik Min’s paper 'A Visual Collective Biography of the Former Korean Comfort Women'. The collective biography in poetic form is inspired by ‘memory-work’ that moves towards a collective history. The Wednesday Demonstrations have been a central influence; Min’s visit to the House of Sharing, the group conversations, and the paintings by the former sexual slaves have provided material for the articulation of ‘the stories without voice’. The original text has been reworked by Shirley Lee with the author’s permission.
What could a dissident be?
A sibilant discord
a stand-up comic
an artist, or just someone
who disagrees with authority?
'for my wife, who waits every day
Nothing remains in your name, nothing
but to wait for me, together with the dust of our home'
All that I have, I have to hand over to you
as believers hand over their souls to God.
If the cross in your heart is now risen,
without faltering I will dye it with blood.
Liu Xiaobo's 'You Wait for Me With Dust' - Chinese original: 和灰尘一起等我 - 给终日等待的妻
'How do I tell you now about the way
they placed it in his hands, a baby’s weight,
just as tenderly pulled his shoulders back
to take the heave and coil, every fresh blow
leaving him sore, the sour echo of this
is how you kill a man?'
'He asked me to put the hairs
in a small yellow box. It was plastic,
with a catch at the front that clicked
when closed.'
Somewhere in the sunshine of the everlasting dawn
from my airborne stance
I feel absorbed across the broad pavement.
Or am I dissolved in a voice
that can’t sever from its verse.
How oft do mates bang on at length about
how well they’re hung, they grab their crotch then slash
the air, then chuck an arm at will around
a chum while necking Stella till they’re lashed.
Hiuen Tsang spent seventeen years travelling from China to India and back in the seventh century CE, at the time of the Tang dynasty emperor Taizong. His adventures inspired Wu Ch’en-en’s sixteenth century novel, Journey to the West, which refers to India as ‘Buddha’s pure land’.
We're in free fall
from life to life
From the gallows on Tower Hill
to a palace in Old Cathay...
I should have kept it –
the tongue I grew up with,
the language of my mother
and her mother before her...
I make steady progress across the board.
‘Imperious’ is the word you use to describe it,
While mounting a nonchalant defence,
Against my hopeful, hopping pegs,
Pygmy soldiers in the Shanghai dusk.
In Hong Kong, an art installation is taken down when the artists explain what it really means.
The four plastic sunflowers in my bedroom –
The way they swayed in the ceiling fan’s air
Were the functional year-long April for me.
The cockpit dashboard blinks
A thousand eyes
Each dial a finger
Spinning him somewhere
Far beyond the star-rimmed sky...
The floor is cold with the coming winter.
I pull on white socks
and sit down before the blackout window
to think about our separation closing in.
It took an artist a hundred days to suck
enough pollutants out of the Beijing air to make a brick...
In Eden, the fig leaf failed its mission – the fruit hung
Immodestly from the tree, tender as a testicle.
After a painting, ‘Yogini in the forest’, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
'It had something to do with the air...'
Jiangnan canals are frozen
Men walking home are murdered
for a pint of rice. Door to door, orphans
beg for gruel. Sly, greasy cooks invite them
in to welcoming kitchens.
Harem whore. Worthy Lady. Concubine.
Then Consort. Then the Noble Consort Yi.
It is raining, but people’s faces are flowing, hugging separate things as they enter the used-book store. They unhappily place their book in a vacant space and then one worn out book spreads open in secret.
Shamed by your denial,
we wait:
Glory and repentance,
we seek both.
we need both.
‘They have families to feed,’ I was told.
‘They really cannot be blamed.’
Three poems by Tammy Ho, originally published in the Summer 2006 issue of the Asia Literary Review.
According to RocketNews24, peach producers in the PRC are struggling to make sales. A controversial marketing ploy prompted China-based poet Reid Mitchell to pen this paean to peaches.
The army opened the gates,
the barracks, the sports fields,
the armoury to us today
So we now know
when we are gunned down
it will be by lonely
boys
In February the north wind was still sharpening its knife
on the granite of Lantau Peak.
A man on a motorcycle sped up
to slit open the skin of a journalist;
exposed his backbone.
First day and Third Uncle says,
‘Raining liao, last year not like that.’
Spring, in his mind
is a static, sweltering brightness.
You came to me like the rain.
Time passed; the weather changed
and you left puddles on the earth
that showed me the sky in the mud.
Seeing the strange belts
like little mouth masks
hung on bamboo poles
I often wondered ...
The trapped their caves escape.
The honest poor rejoice in the streets of Baghdad,
and birds despite the cage
have words enough to speak.
This poem was inspired by the death of Jyoti Singh Pandey who was gang-raped in a bus in Delhi on 16 December 2012. She later died in a hospital in Singapore, where she was sent for treatment by the Indian authorities. The Indian media called the 23 year-old woman Nirvaya, the fearless one. It was her father, Badrinath Singh, who revealed her name. He wanted the world to know who she was.
Simon Peter gives his own account of knife crime.
A sword? Some sword.
I grabbed a meat knife off the table
when Jeshua warned us
we had a betrayer in our midst.
For work that hasn't yet been transferred from our previous website, click on one of the links below:
- All archived poetry - more than 200 poems
- Seamus Heaney
- Selected contemporary Chinese poetry
- Liu Xiaobo
More highlights coming soon...
'Wherever people are gathered
there are gunshots to be heard....'
Read The Executioner and other poems by Jang Jin-sung, translated by Shirley Lee
Poems from Modern Chinese Poetry: Insistent Voices, by Zheng Danyi.
Bei Dao, Duo Duo, Shu Ting, Yang Lian, Gu Cheng, Zhai Yongmin, Bai Hua, Zhang Zhao, Chen Dongdong, Zheng Danyi.
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Sandip Roy
