Poetry And Me

I have been writing poems since the age of 5. I even distinctly remember where the first inspiration came from. Although I don't have a great memory and I often forget many incidents that others around me remember in detail, but I remember this episode. That is because I have a very selective memory. I remember things, people and incidents in great detail if they matter a lot to me. Anyhow, so this incident somehow has remained intact in my head. The image of a 5 year old, skinny and laughing girl, watching TV with great interest when what the only channel has got to offer is a 'Hasya aur Vyangya Kavi Sammelan', yeah that's a gathering of poets who pride themselves in humor and satire. I don't know how it caught my 5 year old fancy but immediately after the program that was what I wanted to do. I told Mom that I wanted to write poems and she laughed and said that I could when I grow up. I never had the patience to wait so I just gave it a try. Writing poetry in English never occurred to me back then. The obvious choice was Hindi because I had watched the Kavi Sammelan in Hindi, and although my vocabulary in both English and Hindi was very limited at that time, I was still more comfortable in Hindi. I remember my first poem was more like a song and it was something about dancing flower buds :-) In fact since my Mom collected a lot of my poems for many years, I had the opportunity to read that poem numerous times in the coming years and every year it embarrassed me more than it did the previous year. I won't even dream of putting it down here :-)

So I kept writing poetry in the years to come and I always wrote of things that I saw in nature; flowers, snow, water, wind and sometimes there was an occasional poem about fairies or people. My family was proud of my poetry, all of my poems rhymed perfectly and I read my poems on a few occasions in the morning assembly at school. On one big occasion during the time when Uttaranchal was still a part of Uttar Pradesh and the people of Uttaranchal demanded that it should be a separate state, there was a gathering of several poets from Uttaranchal who wrote and read their poems in front of a big audience. I had the privilege to be a part of that gathering and as the youngest poet I read one of mine too. It was about the state of Uttaranchal and I had written that only because I was asked some days back to write something for the occasion and not because I had any real feelings on the subject. I was too young to understand why we should have a separate state and had to think hard before writing the poem. Anyway, I did write that poem, read it before the audience and accepted their applause. Incidentally, I don't remember any of the poems of other poets who were present there, some of them were well known writers too. In fact I don't remember anything else about that evening except that I read a poem before a big audience and then rushed back from stage to my Mom sitting in the audience. I was in 8th or 9th standard at that time, not too young but somehow my memory fails me about the other happenings of that evening.

However, the poetry writing spree was abruptly stopped when I studied in 10th. I had a big accident and in the aftermath a big loss that nobody including me noticed for a long while was that I had stopped writing poems. A couple of years later I tried but I couldn't. I thought that it was just a childhood thing and I had now grown out of it. But it seems that poetry is too much a part of me because it resurfaced many years later and this time in English :-) I don't write great poems, in fact I feel embarrassed in sharing them with many people, so they lie dead in my laptop. And I don't even write that often now, only when I feel so full of some emotions that they cannot be expressed in any other way, I write a poem to let them out. This happened when I started writing a post on December 11, the only way I could write on that day was in the form of a poem although it was very unstructured and effortless. I composed directly on blogger and edited very little and thus happened my first poem after years that was written for anybody to read.

Yesterday I read a poem on one of the posts of The Unsung Psalm, which was beautiful. I started writing a comment on that post and what came out were few lines that started with the last line of the poem that he had posted. I like the lines that I wrote and would post them here too

I do not die

I just live on

To see what you do

When I am gone

Would you feel me

In the morning dew

Or forget my touch

In days too few

Would you hear me

In the gentle rain

Or would I call you

Just in vain

Would you know

That I caressed

Or would you be

Forever unimpressed

When The Unsung Psalm asked me where those lines were from I paused to think before replying that they were out of my own head. I read the lines again and again to decide whether they were any good but then I decided that good or bad, they were mine and I liked them and I would not abandon that poem as an orphan that belongs to no one and yet exists. Hence, I replied that they were mine and therefore I am putting them here on my blog too. Good or bad, they are mine :-)