http://www.pyrtajournal.com/
Pyrta: A Journal of Poetry and Things
/pir:taa (Verb) = to call out
Pyrta is a journal of poetry and other things based in Shillong, a small hill-station town in Meghalaya, India.
It's a little bit local, and mostly universal.
Pyrta aims to be a vibrant multicultural space - we'd like voices from all over to contribute quality work categorised broadly under Poetry, Photo Essays, Prose, Sketches and Local morsels.
We want to provide authors/photographers/artists, whether new or established, a platform to share what they love doing.
We follow faithfully in the footsteps of Paul Valery who once said, "I can't help it, I'm interested in everything".
founder/editor/text - Janice Pariat
editorial consultants - Robin S Ngangom, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih, Bah Ravi
art/pictures/visual material - Wanphrang Diengdoh
post autumn
from eight seasons
I did not invent the
trees but learn their
names gave yours
to some they did not
object and repeated it
in the wind even
the wind carries it well
from tree to tree to you.
the moon
from a round dance
lea when i look at the moon
that is slowly becoming full
i do not think of you the
moon has nothing in common
with you lea its pale its craggy
its light bone-white surface does
not resemble you in the least and
still dear lea i think of you whether
or not i see the slow full moon
because even before i saw it lea
most of all i was thinking of you.
Raphael works as poet, translator and musician in Berlin. His first volume of poetry, "Lichter in Menlo Park", was published in 2000. His second collection was "Das Gegenteil von Fleisch" (2003), and the latest "Alle Deine Namen" (2008).
By Anindita Sengupta
I, who yearned the unfamiliar, its cool touch
like a silk robe, its cruel thrills - you don't know
what I mean and the turning away - I now study
this continent between our skins, our rough
and combustible boundaries. I try your footprints on
for size, and skid. Its a wreck. Its all lies
when we speak, words like spiders skulking
in the bath. Their eyes are prophetic. Their legs
leak blood. I ring the tub with preventive.
This is more than I wanted: love as beautified disease.
This is being assailed by the same germ repeatedly
until ones immunity breaks. This is losing,
and us ceasing to remember what we have lost.
This is love turning to hair on our tongues.
Auk
By Anindita Sengupta
Fleshed with sawdust, tamped with glue,
you sit upright in those ghoulish rooms,
glass-eyed and unseeing. You grow languid
with memory: pink coral, shoals of angelfish
flittering among seaweed, the beautiful
and mute rituals of living -
the way your body changed hue
after making love, the drowsy warming
of an egg as it lay like an enormous pearl
in the sun, the luted sounds of its waking.
And how the others started vanishing
until one day they were gone, every last one,
and you stood alone, a black and white speck
with bewildered eyes, clicking your beak
at sea and sky. Nobody knows
what dreams allow
but in the east wing, a door yawns.
The guard tell me you glow in the dark.
Evening
By Anindita Sengupta
Lets talk of how we opened oysters to scent the evening.
You meant the pearls as offering; I meant the evening.
Shadowing each other up cobbled steps and back this is
how we gathered the tides, the snow in Kent, the evening.
Sandwich. Dover. Deal. The bus turned peripatetic:
Black mountains outlined in mist, distant tents, the evening.
Through that restless winter, we asked those worn questions -
will you rent a movie? Shall I rent the evening?
Wigs, wine, wickedness. We play at versions of self.
Across the sky with silken squawks, white geese accent the evening.
My eyelids remember him like a lash of rain,
This memory is an absent one. Absent, the evening.
Why don't you come in for once, he challenged with a sneer.
How dark it gets outside. How imminent, the evening.
Corridors are not rooms, Anu. In them, you will carve nothing,
not a word, not a letter. You won't even dent the evening.
Anindita is a poet and freelance writer in Bangalore, India. Her first collection "City of Water" was published by Sahitya Akademi in February 2010.
Pyrta: A Journal of Poetry and Things
/pir:taa (Verb) = to call out
It's a little bit local, and mostly universal.
Pyrta aims to be a vibrant multicultural space - we'd like voices from all over to contribute quality work categorised broadly under Poetry, Photo Essays, Prose, Sketches and Local morsels.
We want to provide authors/photographers/artists, whether new or established, a platform to share what they love doing.
We follow faithfully in the footsteps of Paul Valery who once said, "I can't help it, I'm interested in everything".
founder/editor/text - Janice Pariat
editorial consultants - Robin S Ngangom, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih, Bah Ravi
art/pictures/visual material - Wanphrang Diengdoh
post autumn
from eight seasons
I did not invent the
trees but learn their
names gave yours
to some they did not
object and repeated it
in the wind even
the wind carries it well
from tree to tree to you.
the moon
from a round dance
lea when i look at the moon
that is slowly becoming full
i do not think of you the
moon has nothing in common
with you lea its pale its craggy
its light bone-white surface does
not resemble you in the least and
still dear lea i think of you whether
or not i see the slow full moon
because even before i saw it lea
most of all i was thinking of you.
Raphael works as poet, translator and musician in Berlin. His first volume of poetry, "Lichter in Menlo Park", was published in 2000. His second collection was "Das Gegenteil von Fleisch" (2003), and the latest "Alle Deine Namen" (2008).
I am not part of your language
I, who yearned the unfamiliar, its cool touch
like a silk robe, its cruel thrills - you don't know
what I mean and the turning away - I now study
this continent between our skins, our rough
and combustible boundaries. I try your footprints on
for size, and skid. Its a wreck. Its all lies
when we speak, words like spiders skulking
in the bath. Their eyes are prophetic. Their legs
leak blood. I ring the tub with preventive.
This is more than I wanted: love as beautified disease.
This is being assailed by the same germ repeatedly
until ones immunity breaks. This is losing,
and us ceasing to remember what we have lost.
This is love turning to hair on our tongues.
Auk
By Anindita Sengupta
Fleshed with sawdust, tamped with glue,
you sit upright in those ghoulish rooms,
glass-eyed and unseeing. You grow languid
with memory: pink coral, shoals of angelfish
flittering among seaweed, the beautiful
and mute rituals of living -
the way your body changed hue
after making love, the drowsy warming
of an egg as it lay like an enormous pearl
in the sun, the luted sounds of its waking.
And how the others started vanishing
until one day they were gone, every last one,
and you stood alone, a black and white speck
with bewildered eyes, clicking your beak
at sea and sky. Nobody knows
what dreams allow
but in the east wing, a door yawns.
The guard tell me you glow in the dark.
Evening
By Anindita Sengupta
Lets talk of how we opened oysters to scent the evening.
You meant the pearls as offering; I meant the evening.
Shadowing each other up cobbled steps and back this is
how we gathered the tides, the snow in Kent, the evening.
Sandwich. Dover. Deal. The bus turned peripatetic:
Black mountains outlined in mist, distant tents, the evening.
Through that restless winter, we asked those worn questions -
will you rent a movie? Shall I rent the evening?
Wigs, wine, wickedness. We play at versions of self.
Across the sky with silken squawks, white geese accent the evening.
My eyelids remember him like a lash of rain,
This memory is an absent one. Absent, the evening.
Why don't you come in for once, he challenged with a sneer.
How dark it gets outside. How imminent, the evening.
Corridors are not rooms, Anu. In them, you will carve nothing,
not a word, not a letter. You won't even dent the evening.
Anindita is a poet and freelance writer in Bangalore, India. Her first collection "City of Water" was published by Sahitya Akademi in February 2010.
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