UMAR NIZARUDEEN // Two Poems
|
Prize cultures
The day the editor Rejected my poem, He won this big, international prize His greatest triumph, a lottery and I Write novels as poetry With self-subjectivized Is, and Ditties. as plays in verse With corny sootradhars. Rational epics as romantic tirades Self-pity as cunning now And cunning as self-pity then (is this already complicated enough, the authorial voice?) writes God, or The devil, or Both, in conjunction Bellowing from the intestines To rise above myself. Kavya Rasa should fill the poet Like wine does a pot Unless pot with wine isn’t brimming The poet is but wasting ink. But sometimes, The poet Is a broken pitcher, watering Till it leaks from the cracks Taking a break, once in a while Passing piss, and something else. |
Umar Nizarudeen is a poet whose works have been published by Muse India, the culture café journal of the British Library and also broadcast by the All India Radio. He has worked as a journalist with the New Indian Express and as proofreader with McKinsey and is a research scholar at JNU. He lives in Delhi.
|