Showing posts with label Urna Bose. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Urna Bose. Show all posts

Urna Bose (Voices Within 2023)

Urna Bose is an award-winning advertising professional, writer, poet, editor, and reviewer. Her poetry has gone viral, globally. She won ‘The Enchanting Editor Award 2019’, from the Telangana Poetry Forum, and the ‘Women Empowered - Scintillating Creative Impactful – Feminine Power Inspiration Award 2020’. And the prestigious Nissim International Prize for Poetry, 2021. As the Deputy Editor for Different Truths, she also devotes her time to the ‘Poet 2 Poet’ column. Urna’s advertising campaigns have won both Indian and global creativity awards, and some are even industry case studies. Urna believes that soulful poetry and gooey chocolate cake can fix everything.

 


Why a Peace Poem Must Die

 

The peacock must have its mating dance,

the gulmohar, its red, hot rage.

Honesty must have its tail tucked

between its hind legs, crouched

behind the trembling bush. 

Lest fate gets handed out nimbly: a deer

caught in the headlights - ready for the clicking

cameras of a hoard of spectator-sport tourists.

 

Pink-plumaged flamingos crash landing on an

indolent swamp, a reminder that seasons are

caravans as are politicians, cultivated points of view,

and elaborately drawn-up party manifestos. 

That blood-plumaged wars cannot be left behind

in the pages of a yellowed history textbook,

priced Rs 210, moth-eaten in a rickety stall

in College Street, Kolkata.

 

And, the reason why a peace poem cannot hoist

a white flag on its whimpering chest,

the blaze breaking through the pores of its skin, 

is only because its voice will be gagged,

its throat cut out in fine, fleshy juliennes,

at the phantom hour of its publication.

 

 

The Fate of a Poem

Wrapped in the sullen darkness

of the moss-laden room, a hollowed hankering

gathers – an imminent Kalbaishakhi upon its chest,

the poem ponders on the gap between loneliness

and aloneness - how far must one

travel to shapeshift into the other.

 

Cautiously choosing which side of the

serrated fence to lay bare its fatigued haunches,

having learned the arduous rules of the waiting game.

And yet, not quite - to be read or not to be read

is battle enough, an aching breadcrumb of

remembrance is too far a cry.

 

Swallowing down in its blue-veined throat,

the throbbing hope to be held in your hands,

the longing to be gazed at from behind a softened iris.

Read and re-read for its syntax, semiotics, cadence, nuance,

to be uttered by your lips, its sallow gawkiness

slowly smudging into the printed white page.

 

Yet, it now negotiates these heaving expectations

quelling its hunger rising from the starvation vortex

and signs on the dotted line of the realty agreement

for a single, lone room in your consciousness.

No, it dares not dream of an apartment, a penthouse,

or a bungalow even, with manicured lawns.

 

A maimed dream is a translucent wing yanked out of

the tendon of a flailing limb, the poem can tell by now.

So it quietly settles for a room with a jagged window,

a tendrilled bougainvillea may languidly stray over

its frayed edge, its Wordsworthian heredity battling

the virulent 21st-century dwindling readers’ focus.

 

And it resignedly whittles down into this room on lease,

till a minute later, another poem proclaims it can

out-pay the paltry lease, and that very

absent-minded moment, you also turn the page,

declaring the poem, a refugee,

stripped off the home of your attention.

 

*Kalbaishakhi - Also known as a nor'wester, is a localized shower and thunderstorm that occurs in Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha, Tripura, Assam, and West Bengal during summer.

 

 

My Grandfather’s Ancestral House

I’m a derelict house,

dressed in creaking staircases,
the haunting and the haunted are

interchangeable often.
The pin, I can’t share on your

updated Google map app, but

I invite you in with purple jacaranda

kisses on your nape.
My fleshy arms - the dead porch,

belly button - the trap door.

My heart - the attic between

your fingers where mine
couldn’t slip in, and so

the windchime ghosts came to rest.
My eyes, the forgiving

messiah full-moon, dropping pins
in the nooks and crannies I’ve scribbled

my half-poems in, now I make

my own map of atonement for you,

to trace your homecoming.

URNA BOSE, INDIA (Peace Poem)

Urna Bose
The Failure of Words

Pressing my palms together, the three-dimensional origami of ‘prayer’.
‘Peace’ – a bone-white synonym for phony.
Rice, turnips, last rights – hang in there Syria.
‘Humanity’ - a prescription for headlines and breaking news.
Meanwhile, my ghost awaits her turn in the queue.
‘Refugee’ – the swarming flies aren’t that, perfectly at ‘home’
in my splattered belly. The bullets cough up putrid
‘condolences’ – interchangeable for causes or chants.
Then, another word furtively slithers up my spine.
‘Please’ – an invocation to the hovering grey-mottled vulture above.



Profile:
Urna Bose is an award-winning advertising professional, writer, poet, editor, and reviewer. Her poetry has gone viral, globally. She won ‘The Enchanting Editor Award 2019’, from the Telangana Poetry Forum and the ‘Women Empowered - Scintillating Creative Impactful – Feminine Power Inspiration Award 2020’. And the prestigious Nissim International Prize for Poetry, 2021. As the Deputy Editor for Different Truths, she also devotes her time to the ‘Poet 2 Poet’ column. Urna’s advertising campaigns have won global creativity awards, and some are industry case studies.

Voices Within: Urna Bose

Urna Bose is an advertising professional, writer, poet, and editor. Her poetry has gone viral, globally. She won ‘The Enchanting Editor Award 2019’, from the Telangana Poetry Forum, and the ‘Women Empowered - Scintillating Creative Impactful – Feminine Power Inspiration Award 2020’. And recently, the prestigious Nissim International Prize for Poetry, 2021. As the Deputy Editor for Different Truths, she also devotes her time to the ‘Poet 2 Poet’ column. Urna’s vast body of work include clutter-breaking advertising campaigns, and iconic brand work. Urna’s campaigns have won Indian and global creativity awards, and some are even industry case-studies.


The Arithmetic of Love

Two wistful eyes: enlarged.

Both forgetting my Irish convent school

manners: staring is rude.
Two hands: longing to encircle you.
The diameter of shrinking distance,

the immeasurable radius of desire.

 

Two curious fingers: daredevilish.

The incalculable angle of a wanton wants

to own you. The 90-degree tangent

of my temperamental finger climbing.

The square of whimsicality,

with its wobbling centre of gravity,

off centred, thrown off.

 

Your stubby fingertips

on my back, circle sublime,

and the elliptical paradox

of a sudden hickey.

Hope it stays engraved longer,

under my printed red scarf.

 

Two ears: wayward.

Wanting to be gently nibbled.

Not gobbled up, not wolved down.

To slow down, is to savour.

 

Two thighs: not perfectly parallel.

Heaving and sighing.
Waxing and waning, moodily.

How many millimetres

make a kilometre, did you say?

And, how do you measure the full moon

drenched in desire,

with your meticulous metric system?

 

Two hearts: throbbing.

From the melancholic,

vinyl-record ingrained

rings of Saturn,

to the auburn volcanoes,

rusty canyons and the two small,

red-smeared moons of Mars.

Two pulsating hearts: one mine,

the other, yours.

Resting content,

valved in, within the chambers

of mine.

 

You are a sceptic.

“But where’s the proof, the hypothesis,

the logic?” you ask.

The penetrating pinch of your musk, pinches.

The salty lemony doubt

cutting the sweetness

at a sharp 30-degree slant.

 

Vanishing dregs of doubt,

find their way back.

Hang on. Let me check.

I look inside my heart, once again.

 

Why, your heart’s right there,

inside mine.

The veins entwined,

the arteries intersecting.

Hot, hammering blood

rushing straight to my cheeks.

 

But wait, scores must be

settled in love.

So, I answer back, belligerently.

“Hey, my arithmetic

is effed up, in any case.”

 

 

Not a Dream, To Dream

 

A skyful of puffed-up,

cobalt blue, iridescent dreams

condense and compress

their nymph like anatomies,

into a tightened claustrophobic knot.

 

The knot I hold in

the alcove of my hardened collar bone.

Like rain water, stored

in the hollow cavities and craters of

calciferous Mumbai buildings.

 

Mumbai, the city of dreams and

kahani-mein-twist* destinies.

Really, yahaan kuch bhi ho sakta hai**.

Where the greedy builder,

ran out of cement and granite,

concrete and bricks,

intention and integrity,

and left the cavities to

stare vacuously,

at the new apartment owners

paying blood EMIs.

 

EMI: it’s the nimble acronym for

easy monthly instalments.

There’s nothing “easy” about them,

I assure you.

 

The blood gushing through

the dreamy house owner’s

flared nostrils and spilling out

on new 2x2, slightly tacky floor tiles.

Reddish brown. Tinged with black.

Extracted out of the arteries

with an exploiter’s precision.

The fine print in font size 7,

effortlessly illegible, putting

good old Shylock to shame.

A labyrinth of clauses and

conditions, fees and taxes.

The “feeding” of fattened middle men,

and their fattened middle men.

The sacrosanct food chain, you better

kneel before, and fold your

sweaty middle-class palms

with the devotion of a desperate pilgrim.

 

Owning your own house

in Mumbai?

How dare you dream,

such a dream?

How dare I dream,

such a dream?

 

How dare? How dare?

 

* Twist-in-the-tale

** Anything is possible here.

 

 

 

Friendship

 

Friendship is a strange,

exotic, faraway country,

at times.


You need me?
Every flight is available.

Visa? What a silly, trivial concern.
There’s visa on arrival,

without a queue, of course.

 

All gates, wide open.

No security checks.

No immigration checks.

Bright orange, thick marigold garlands

around my neck, placards

grandiosely announcing “welcome”

in big, bold, trusted, upper case Garamond.

When you need me,

I am the overwhelmed guest of honour.

But when, I need you?
Visa? Are you out

of your mind, my dear?

Don’t you know, all gates are tightly closed?
Immigration, extra stringent.

Security checks, extra tight.

‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’.

Bob Dylan plays on loop,

somewhere faraway.

 

Dutifully, the weather report

declares, “icy, harsh winds,

turbulence, storms,” and of course,

the matlabi* slippery slope of glaciers.


Friendship is a strange, exotic,

faraway country,

at times.

When you need me,

I am the guest of honour.

You lovingly plead, “stay, please stay”.
Yet when I need you,

I am a homeless refugee.

 

Now, I’m learning to unpack,

neatly packed into rolls,

fastidiously folded, tidily arranged bags.

Now, I’m also learning to read,

between the lines.

 

The boundary lines.

The border lines.

And the sacrosanct,

un-trespass-able LOC.

 

Friendship is a strange, exotic,

faraway country.

Or maybe, I’m not

cut out for travel.

 

*Opportunistic

Urna Bose: Poetry (Voices Within 2021)

Urna Bose is an advertising professional, writer, widely published poet and editor. Her poems have gone viral, globally. She won the ‘Enchanting Editor Award 2019’, from the Telangana Poetry Forums, and the ‘Women Empowered Kamala Das Special Mention - Scintillating Creative Impactful – Feminine Power Inspiration Award 2020’. As the Deputy Editor for Different Truths, she devotes her time to the ‘Poet 2 Poet’ column. Having worked with advertising giants, like R K Swamy/BBDO, McCann Erickson, Lowe Lintas and others, her campaigns have won Indian and global creativity awards, and some are industry case-studies. Urna believes that poetry can fix everything.

WHAT POETS DO 

You know what poets do? 
They poem out their pain. 
The niggling vermin 
that drive them insane. 

They poem out their sorrow. 
That like a disease, 
resides deep 
in their bone marrow. 

They poem out their past. 
The shifting grains 
of the sands of time, 
trickling through gawky fingers fast. 

You know what poets do? 
They poem out the inner contours,
of their depth. 
The insomniac conscience that without 
those sleeping pills, couldn’t have slept. 

They poem out the complicated chambers 
of their heart. 
That throbbing, pulsating, 
vulnerable baggage,
that aching body part. 

They poem out their compassion. 
The gloopy tenderness 
within, they simply didn’t 
learn how to ration. 

You know what poets do? 
They poem out their sixth sense. 
Their intuitive, clairvoyant, 
beyond the stare-in-your-face-logic lens. 

They poem out their own sweet blood. 
Sometimes a trickle. 
Sometimes an uncontrollable, 
break-the-walls-of-the-dam flood. 

They poem out insults swallowed, 
but not quite digested yet. 
The inky-black muck, hurled and thrown, 
when massages the ego doesn’t get. 

You know what poets do?
They poem out their poems in vain. 
“Will I too join the foggy graveyard 
of dead poets”, I wonder in disdain. 

They poem out their poems, 
because well, they just have to. 
A crimson-coloured aching 
or a longing that’s tinted deep-blue.

They poem out the silly, 
unsayable things. 
Kisses dissolved on the tongue, 
sweet nothings, their smoky, nebulous rings. 

You know what poets do?
They poem out what their eyes can see. 
Their gaze, a penetrating surgeon's knife, 
that seldom grows hazy. 

You know what poets do.
They poem out the world 
questioning their true motive to write. 
But doesn’t the world question anything 
that's not shiny, blingy and bright?

You know what poets do. 
They poem out those 
intravenous upheavals, 
they never knew they could feel. 

Yes sometimes, they heal their own 
dishevelled selves. 
But sometimes, it's the reader 
who also needs to heal.
***


YOUR MEMORIES VS YOU

Somehow the things you 
don't want to remember, 
stare angrily at you. 
Their eyes spitting out 
hot, glowing embers.

And the things you 
want to remember,
thrive on some strange, perverse pleasure. 
Of keeping your eyes 
tightly blindfolded.

Your memories are a 
funny, jumbled, disorienting 
bundle of contradictions, 
constantly colliding into each other. 
So somehow, you’re always losing this 
unfair 'your memories vs you' game.

Then again, what in life is fair?
Ask the labyrinth of your memories 
in all earnestness,
and you'll hear the soft echoes,
if you strain your ears hard enough.
"Nothing really. 
Nothing at all is fair. 
Ever.”
***


A RANDOM AFTERNOON EXPERIMENT

It was a bronze-tinted afternoon.
I was tired of being 
the same old, predictable, silly me.

So I took off my rose-tinted glasses.
The world then, willingly and eagerly 
showed itself to me.

Its ugly blacks, sullen greys and 
plastic, synthetic whites.
Oh, don’t ask, such a spectre.
My innards began to churn, 
my head began to swirl 
and my startled heart,
squished like a Lilliputian beneath 
Gulliver’s sturdy, giant, heartless boots.

In frantic desperation,
I groped around for my glasses.
My old, trusted friend – 
yes, that rose-tinted pair,
and put them right back on, 
where they always belonged.

Hugging my illusions 
and my delusions,
tighter than ever before,
in that given moment.
Silly me is the only me,
I’d ever like to be.

And, you and me 
are nothing
but a stained-glass mosaic 
of our illusions and delusions,
pieced together randomly. 
Nothing more. 
Nothing less, my silly.