madeofverses

[madeofverses]

High on life (2021)

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[madeofverses]

I call this a poem although after creating a beautiful turbulence inside me the words shed their music as they surface and settle into the steadier pattern of prose. I was always hoping to be able to write this. But a poem does not ripen for you, you have to ripen for it.

- Kamala Das, from “The Introduction,” Selected Poems.

[madeofverses]

“It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea,how the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,how the floor receives the bottoms of shoes or toes. How soles of feet know where they’re supposed to be. I’ve been thinking about the patience of ordinary things, how clothes wait respectfully in closets and soap dries quietly in the dish, and towels drink the wet from the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window?”

Pat Schneider, ‘The Patience of Ordinary Things’ 

[madeofverses]

If light is scarce then light is scarce; we will immerse ourselves in the darkness and there discover its own particular beauty.

In the mansion called literature I would have the eaves deep and the walls dark, I would push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly, I would strip away the useless decoration. I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them.

We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

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Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person. Time flows in the same way for all human beings; every human being flows through time in a different way.

- Yasunari Kawabata ,Beauty And Sadness

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It is I who drink lonely

Drinks at twelve, midnight, in hotels of strange towns,

It is I who laugh, it is I who make love

And then, feel shame, it is I who lie dying

With a rattle in my throat. I am sinner,

I am saint. I am the beloved and the

Betrayed. I have no joys that are not yours, no

Aches which are not yours. I too call myself I.

Kamala Das, from “An Introduction” featured in Kamala Das: Selected Poems 

[madeofverses]

मुझसे पहली सी मोहब्बत -फ़ैज़ अहमद फ़ैज़

मुझसे पहली-सी मुहब्बत मिरे महबूब न मांग

मैनें समझा था कि तू है तो दरख़शां है हयात

तेरा ग़म है तो ग़मे-दहर का झगड़ा क्या है

तेरी सूरत से है आलम में बहारों को सबात

तेरी आखों के सिवा दुनिया में रक्खा क्या है

त�� जो मिल जाये तो तकदीर नगूं हो जाये

यूं न था, मैनें फ़कत चाहा था यूं हो जाये

और भी दुख हैं ज़माने में मुहब्बत के सिवा

राहतें और भी हैं वसल की राहत के सिवा

अनगिनत सदियों के तारीक बहीमाना तिलिसम

रेशमो-अतलसो-किमख्वाब में बुनवाए हुए

जा-ब-जा बिकते हुए कूचा-ओ-बाज़ार में जिस्म

ख़ाक में लिबड़े हुए, ख़ून में नहलाये हुए

जिस्म निकले हुए अमराज़ के तन्नूरों से

पीप बहती हुयी गलते हुए नासूरों से

लौट जाती है उधर को भी नज़र क्या कीजे

अब भी दिलकश है तिरा हुस्न मगर क्या कीजे

और भी दुख हैं ज़माने में मुहब्बत के सिवा

राहतें और भी हैं वसल की राहत के सिवा

मुझसे पहली-सी मुहब्बत मिरे महबूब न मांग

[madeofverses]

Twas a puff of the season

That shook the portrait that hung so listlessly

In the days of yore, the walls weren’t so moist

Who knows why the moistness crept in

Don’t know why the cracks came

And the moistness shows

Like the tears on a face so blank

This rain once sang on the rooftops

It used to write on the windowpanes

Alas it weeps away behind a cage now

And the afternoons are so

Like a chess without the pieces

There’s no one to play, just no one

Neither the day breaks, nor the night comes

Everything seems still

Perhaps ’twas a puff of the season

That shook the portrait on this wall.

[madeofverses]

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

[madeofverses]

The Most Heartbreakingly Beautiful Lines In Literature

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We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.

- Shakespeare, The Tempest

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone? 

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

- Edgar Allan Poe, A Dream within a Dream

[madeofverses]

Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise. It greeted her at the end of each day and lay still with her at night.

- Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland

[madeofverses]

I thought of how much they all wanted to be free; how they went mad wanting their freedom; I began to wonder whether it was I that was mad because I was happy to be bound; whether I was alone in knowing that I could not live without the clamour of the voices within me.

- Amitav Ghosh , The Shadow Lines

[madeofverses]

She knew he’d be back. No matter how elaborate its charade, she recognized loneliness when she saw it. She sensed that in some strange tangential way, he needed her shade as much as she needed his. And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.

- Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

[madeofverses]

Maktub

I would like to believe there is a tree or an abandoned house , maybe even a distant star somewhere who might have seen us walk past each other years ago in a busy street. The old lamppost under which you might have waited desperately for a cab one night ,could have wished for the blurry image of a dreamy girl in a car that just sped past you to have lingered a little longer , long enough for you to notice. A flower might have seen us standing outside a curio shop and we would have been it's last blooming thought as it fell from above between the feet of two oblivious star crossed lovers. You, my love would protest that we couldn't have met earlier . You would've remembered my face . Your loving eyes , so endearingly looking into mine , might adore my face but deep down it craves for my soul. I've never been a head turner rather the kind you'll easily walk past by , until you call me home. So, I hope unknowingly we walk past that house , the tree, that lampost or beneath that star again ,just this time we'd be walking hand in hand and I know they'd be similing in hues of destiny's prophecies

(27.05.2020.)

Art credit : @mienar

[madeofverses]

some of my favourite scenes from my animated short ‘Golden Hour’!

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[madeofverses]

Bridging my past and my present. #1

They call you a drying seed,

set in stone and tragedy.

Yet I water you religiously ,

right in front of my burning trees.

I've been alone for so long I never understood when it turned into lonliness .

Since childhood , Ive been a socially anxious and introverted girl with barely two friends. Moreover to add to this aloof person that I am I've had multiple horibble incidents in the past . Now the thing is ,every time you lie down with a heavy heart and no one by your side , you truly realise how lonely you exactly are. With every battle you fight on your own , you are more convinced you are meant to be alone and you recede deeped into your self. The problem is, this only happens emotionally , there is only so much human contact that I can cut out. Everyday I have to walk down the same street as everyone else , go to the store where people talk and giggle , have a social media account where people tag each other and post pictures. Although over the years I have stopped caring much , it still hurts.

Last night one of my friend's uncle passed away. I called him up , continuously texted him but he did not reply. I was worried sick wondering if everything is alright and then I see his post in whatsapp and fb stating how traumatised he is. I texted him again but in vain. In the meantime the comment section floods with condolences. Finally he calls me up at night to tell me how all these people texted him long paragraphs and how this girl said these beautiful lines that sums up his emotions. He wanted me to write a paragraph for him like everyone else did. We hung up. I closed my door to my parents quarelling in the dinning room , emptied my plate into the dustbin ,switched off my phone that hardly rings and lay down with a heavy heart.