Now Serene, Now Solitary: Three poems by Anam Tariq
Photo: Karan Madhok
‘I run up to place this piece / where the descending snow / spirals into patterns / of stars and visual poetry’
Distractions
You’ll find me right now
by a warm, drab fire seated
in a dimly-lit drawing room—
a quiet, Little Women setting
minus the hubbub,
cosily uneasy, as this pen lingers
for this winter to be over.
Till then I write this.
A little haggard I am
like the hedgehogs and squirrels
at a tedious year’s end.
A replenishment is there yet
in picking the gold from the grot,
even winter a hope heralds
an imagery puts on (for my epistle),
out the window I see
in the dark a spotless carpet of snow
glimmering everywhere,
peace walks down that bosky
pathway that runs through the town,
bundled humans to the hearth
of their homesteads hurtle.
I think back to you
and the serendipity
that gave me you
and I found my niche.
Poesy, you are to me as a child is
to its mother, an enigma not
as dear to others as it is to her.
My mouthpiece—your verses
inherited by me from those before me,
a word game where all win,
a different language.
I thought you would tarry
but a blank firmament I see now
with no more stars left
to cheer this winter monotony
to become a words’ ridge
on my paper. I’m empty
of you, waiting for a second act
to you and me, another season
of our couplet that can be.
Meanwhile, this repose coaxes you
and brings new distractions to me.
I run up to place this piece
where the descending snow
spirals into patterns
of stars and visual poetry
and perhaps tomorrow there’ll be
a lot of snow to sweep.
*
Green was the Colour
You and I were the Green candidates
of the literature department investigating the green
growth in the not so green age
looking for green solutions
in the green literature.
We were green novices like the burgeoning greens
but ours was a bond as green as memory
of the bereaved one till it turned into a green
gash, sewn with a thread green and needle pale
as I managed to put on a pink face
flashing green-ashen shades of yore.
*
The Sea, Me, and Ambivalence
/æmˈbɪvələns/: n. the state of having two opposite feelings
Chirpy yellow, princess pink, sky blue houses lined–
a team of footballers, the first line of defence,
iron-railed balconies—the crown of mankind
overlooking the sandy, sundering border
and the kingdom of the teal deep stretching
its bod, drawing a line, desperate to be disparate
from the white stroked blue on the other side–
its brother rising above them all; four angles forming.
Food ’n fruit baskets, day parties, kids boasting
sea and shore in their courtyards.
The wan and wooden pier becomes a ‘lighthouse’
to the heroine of a story seeking her love
that the currents swept out. Simply seeming
‘by the shore resting baby whale’ to these eyes.
Swims, out in the middle, a buoy
measuring the sea’s ambivalence.
From time to time the waves curl up
to meet the shore, their white foamy flowers
offering themselves, yet ending with
the sandy friend’s damp besmearing.
They put on at times a sprightly dance
while the music’s set to high tide,
yet with a bawl crash the same waves
when the heart sinks too low.
Gals over its kingdom out there ride,
ships pass through it, travelling from and to mankind,
a bridge and boon yet in adversarial fits
devours or leaves supine. What’s out there
they diversely define, like cosily fitting jigsaw
puzzle pieces, into each other spilling
aptly intertwining hues, some know a palette whose
yellow-orange oil paints bleed into the sea and sky,
know some the flower bunch
growing underdeep, the coral beauty we dearly need
yet oft with the weather the water kingdom conspires,
borrowing a forbidding fury of thunder and the gale
atop which reign the waves—also something known.
While the Carolina creeks lulled Kya to sleep
yet a thing she always craved, after calm when came
a cloudburst of solitude.
At the shore as one stands, it’s water yet not water:
something potable, see through taken as water,
the not potable, see through liquid
of the deep. I see, as I say, I am one
with the sea as it bathes me down
in its elliptical, untrammelled uncertainty:
uncertainty as in—it’s now a friend, now a foe;
now high, now low; now soothing, now raging;
now serene, now solitary.
A coin with two opposite sides
this sea is, as ambivalent I am with wanting,
then not wanting—to indite, to do, to go someplace
and perhaps to pair.
As I take the deep in my embrace,
as shadows of the homesteads out to the water reach,
the kids go in, leaving the lambent locale and salty eyes to me.
***
Anam Tariq is a poet, writer, book reviewer with an MA in English and a poetry collection A Leaf upon a Book (Leadstart, 2022) to her name. She is currently running The Wordsridge Newsletter on Substack and is a writer for Writers’ Cafeteria. Anam’s poems appear in several lit. mags and anthologies like The Punch Magazine, New Reader Magazine, The Alipore Post, LiveWire, Spill Words, Lived Collective, Verse of Silence, etc. You can find her on Instagram: @anam.tariq_ or her website: www.anamtariq.in.
