After 15 Cigarettes
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry by Sana Ahmad: ‘Why more poems are created at cemeteries rather than nurseries; and the living seek to write the voices of the dead.’
With each puff of 15 cigarettes a day,
I remember a city of mourners,
where all gathered to mourn about
the cities destroyed in wars, painters cursed with melancholia, the poet who filled her overcoat pockets with rocks and walked into the river, people who want to suffer trauma to invent art, the readers who read the endings and then the beginnings, and others who are desperate to get their own hearts broken, and to distress, to lose oneself, to become an artist;
I think of ‘grief sellers’ around,
who read and draft theirs and yours and our woes on papers,
because the heartbreak songs hit the million chart.
All the rhythm and blues are the upshot of sorrow.
Why do I want to be silent, when my voice is loudest on pages.
Why my body doesn’t want to feel alive rather
scoring freeze in place and head.
Why just my heart wants whole blackouts to create a masterpiece.
Maybe because it’s in demand;
And the readers reading the endings are the admirers of mere characters.
Who realised that the end can be what it is, and yet it’s not worth waiting for the end?
How Virginia Woolf ended her life in a river when she knew “she had to arrange whatever pieces that came her way.”
Van Gogh got cursed by melancholia after The Starry Nights, Café Terrace at Night, The Potato Eaters, The Yellow House rather than feeling himself as a part of sunflower fields in his own paintings.
Just because the Spanish Civil War destroyed the Basque town of Guernica.
Maybe the regarded art of Pablo Picasso,
was the product of flood of human blood and the bombed villages.
And 15 cigarettes a day is as injurious as misery
or just a way to lead tragedy into the future.
It’s all about sorrow, depression, agony and suffering that sells in markets, that make strangers your lovers and admirers.
Why more poems are created at cemeteries rather than nurseries; and the living seek to write the voices of the dead.
Why bliss and joy are the blocks
but can’t create art.
So, I call them grief sellers, but not artist;
They are selling grief and goodbyes to lilies.
***
Sana Ahmad is an undergraduate at Delhi University and a keen Literature student. She published a poetry collection Won Wars in Spring (Notion Press) in 2019 and has collaborated with several anthologies including the Delhi Poetry Slam. You can find her on Instagram @fromlifafatopoems.
