Published Poetry: Fragrance by Snehith Kumbla

This is how I see it. Poetry is a bird song, uttered so, for it spouts from the heart, and is similarly written down. Having a writing device on the ready is a handy habit, for words may rush in anytime. A common feature of a poem is its flow and spontaneity.

The first draft is usually the crux of it. Polish, in the form of attention to meter, rhyme, paragraphing, punctuation, grammar, spelling and an appropriate title usually follow in subsequent drafts. While I mentioned grammar in the last sentence, a poem can have its own language. Unlike prose, a poem may not be bound to any structure.

There is no end to the themes that poets have chose to write on over the centuries. Now, if we were to encapsulate all the poems ever written into two sections, what would they be? Here we trail Urdu poetry and its branching out into two - there is the ghazal where poets tend to self-reflect and look inwardly. Then there is the nazm where observation of the outwardly world is the central theme. This division can be applied to poems in general, if only for the purpose of differentiation and documentation.

Enough talk. To conclude, here is the poem that was first published in the September-October 2011 issue of Reading Hour Magazine with the title ‘Pang’. It is presented here with edits:

Fragrance
by Snehith Kumbla

the music of a drizzle,
wet smell of earth

a sun scattered face,
some winter morning

the moonlight walks
with me, at dusk

sleep glows in
a deep cave

I dwell on you...

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Published Poetry: Scrap Collector's Diary by Snehith Kumbla

have sieved the

ruins of discarded

things,

sometimes finding

on an old magazine,

pictures of women,

looking through you

with ageless eyes

block square keys of

a typewriter,

cardboard covers

of fragile messages,

images of shattering

glass,

empty bottles of

RAT POISON,

‘Kamasutra for beginners'

‘The lonely wife’

other clandestine

books, sometimes,

extracted from some

secret wardrobe chamber,

wrapped in brown paper

school notebooks with

red tick-marks, blots, rights,

wrongs, devastating

stories of marks, homework,

a light bulb that still works,

the legs of a chair,

toy horses, toy cars,

scratched plastic

gaping holes in mugs, buckets,

fake notes from a crumpled game

of monopoly,

a dead dog's collar, a heavy rusted screw,

every night in my dreams,

they come hopping over a barn,

now you know,

that I do not count sheep

#

(This poem was first published in the Jan-Feb 2012 issue of Reading Hour Magazine.)

Published Poetry: Bhang Diary by Snehith Kumbla

when I laugh,
the whole body,
one big mouth
of laughter

when I sing,
words emit
like a
seismograph

If I squat, drowsy,
all my teeth are
melting down
a whirlpool

walk, look back
and wonder,
whose vanishing
footsteps
are they,

meanwhile,
my as-lost-as-me
friends, frantic for
shade in the sun,
and can't find it

together, like a
splash of colours,
we lie in the garden
for the madness to pass

later, at home they ask
about the blood red
eyes, I say, it was
some colour, some holi

(This poem was first published in the Mar-Apr 2012 issue of Reading Hour magazine.)