Confessions of a Terrified Writer.

For several weeks, my blog has been sitting here like a silent spectator of my life and the world, sometimes begging me to fill it with the enormous thoughts I´ve been struggling with recently and sometimes, just pretending not to exist at all. But today, I finally have the strength and the time to type down these words, and I hope all of you will understand and appreciate my modest effort.

For months I thought the reason behind my failure to write anything worthwhile might be writer´s block, but upon further research and thorough thought, I realised that that wasn´t the problem. I had wonderful ideas, I had all the time in my life and yet, something was holding me back from writing and even after several attempts to write down these ideas, I realised all of it was in vain. Until two days back, when I decided to write down whatever came to my mind.

While letting my mind write , I realised how much easier it is to find the root of problems. As I kept on writing I came to a point where I realised that the only reason I could not write before was because of the guilt, the fear I had towards writing.

It might sound very cowardly, but that is exactly what I´ve been feeling, even what I am feeling right now. Whatever I wrote felt incomplete and wrong, like I wasn´t doing justice to the idea that I was writing about. There was a time when writing made me feel better, but now writing just makes me feel worse off than I was before I started writing that particular piece. My mind feels like an explosion of colours, though beautiful, it is very messy. It feels like a tangled nest of words expressing all that I´m feeling and somewhere, my instincts are telling me that if I do untangle this mess, I might finally rest. But that seems near impossible now.

I´m still not sure about what I´m feeling. Is this just writer´s block or is this something else? Is this because of stress, because of the huge changes that my life saw in the past few months? Maybe my flair for writing was just a phase, and I´m starting to lose it. I have no idea, but I can tell you one thing for sure, neither does this phase feel good nor does this phase feel right. Have any of you ever felt anything similar or are going through the same? If anybody can help me with this, you´re more than welcome to contact me. Thank you for being here, always, I´m grateful to all of you for staying by.

Broken homes.

Lonely birds don´t sing 
instead they let their songs
merge with the glassy tones
of the sleeping city.
but when the blanket folds over 
the sky at midnight
they have no choice but to
vanish with their wings folded under 
and their voices broken like their home. 

Battlefields.

Tell me, does death pose a threat
When peace is a long drawn out war
Hanging in the hands of withering ghosts
And sleeping monarchs, who know all too clearly
That a lie can kill the same way a gun does.
And they speak a million truths hidden behind
The glorious mountains of lies
That divide the betrayed and unite the betrayer
All for a little bit of the peace
That we lost when we were busy
Making our culture.
Tell me again, does death pose a threat,
When peace is what we´re all dying for?

Apology

I met love in an ocean 
Where the sun kissed the ocean goodbye 
And watched her sleep, calm and quiet, through the moon
Often, the clouds seem to spread over the sky 
As if to cover up his mistakes with their fleeting, fading selves
I wonder if somebody would tell them that they’re not enough, that the compensation is too small.

When it comes to people, we’re neither the moon and his stars or the clouds 
We are their dust, counting days with each mistake we make and planning the future in a series of compensations 
Where love takes the form of an apology for acts of worthless ideas which bury themselves in their mothers’ graves the day we commit them 
We ask ourselves if this is enough, if this word can hold what we do not even feel;
We answer the ocean for the sun, and tell her that the dawn will come tomorrow when love will pour her with his light 
But our minds are too weak to realize that when death comes today there is no more life to love tomorrow
And the apology will lie next to her brother in her mother’s grave. 

Burning.

My hells clap against the burnt soil
like an apology to every sin my forefathers
have celebrated in their awakening.
Sometimes the ashes tell more about their birth
than the fire ever will,
Like we, as a species
look up to the sun and call it a burning star.
The fire is a silent spectator
and the dying ash a nonchalant orator:
Over time and oceans, the words change
But the poem does not;
Like we keep quenching the life of a fire
while the only thing keeping the ashes alive
is its burning.

Deaf to beauty.

It is funny how we admire rainbows and sunset skies, but fail to do the same when it comes to our own skin. Maybe we don´t get to name all the stars we see because we fight over the same down here in earth. Perhaps the ocean thinks we will build a wall through it and that is why it keeps breaking down countries and mountains. Have you ever noticed how the trees sway to the music of the wind? Have you ever felt their joy ripple through your skin and something in your mind says that it is peace, it is the peace you have been searching for that you found here? And did you let the wind guide you through it´s poem, it´s rhyme opening your eyes to the world you would have otherwise not seen had you not let your mind open to the raw beauty of what lies so easily in front of your eyes, but what lies so beyond the reach of your understanding? I did, and I have found my abode here, in this eternity. When earth itself has so much beauty to hold and name, I wonder why people do not believe in the existence of heaven. Do they not want more to behold? Do they not want to live more? How do they so easily believe that their soul which has seen so much will silently bury itself with our skin? Our skin, the one we mock and tame, the one which gives us our name, is it greater than the soul which gives us our heart and our mind? Which makes us who we are? How do they so easily deny the existence of an abode of peace for the sake of an eternity spent in hell-fire? Is it because of the same sins we make, break, create and destroy everyday that we fail to admit our own conscience? Is it because of the same battles that we fight within us and ourselves, that we choose to do a greater sin and shamelessly admit, that we are the only ones in this void, a void created out of no purpose? Is it this same blind confession that closes your eyes to the beauty of what you call a void, but what is in fact a purpose in itself, a purpose to hold and tend to and to create life? Is this a void for you? And even more importantly, are all of our sins greater than the mercy which has brought in our very existence?

Perhaps i´ll keep wondering, the crimson sky, though so beautiful does not answer. But the wind grows a little louder every time I say this last thought to myself. Perhaps, it is me, I am not looking hard enough.

Or perhaps, even though I am not blind to this beauty, I am deaf to it´s voice.

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Featured image: Marine drive, Mumbai, India, clicked by Shithiga Rajan

Check out her instagram: @_.shithu._

Sword of the dark.

I’ve seen the ocean get scared of our feet
And recede, slowly, shushing the stories
She has carried all the way from the sky
To tell the shore, and the city
Often, I see the sky smiling, arms open,
Welcoming her child in her bosom,
The sky melting into the ocean as the horizon walks far and beyond
The reach of alluring dreams
Once, I happened to walk into the ocean
The cold waters climbing up my legs
The breeze pulling me in, closer, letting me fall, and drown
I cried and screamed, wondering for a moment, if death could ever be this beautiful
And the ocean laughed at my vanity, at how I saw beauty in the eyes of the void
When, before my eyes lay, what even death could not see;
Oh, fear and beauty, so intricately woven
After all of this, they’re two edges of the same sword.

A note to my countrymen.

While our country is turning elections, which is a basic feature of democracy without which, well, you can’t even call a country a democracy, into a debate platform for the flawed ideals of a few individuals who the people claim to be their representatives, let us also not forget that exactly this day, 100 years ago, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre which happened was one of the greatest turning points in our independence struggle, in which hundreds of simple people, mostly women, children and old people were killed and injured for the sake of creating fear among us Indians, to not keep struggling inside our golden cages. Let us not forget that these people were massacred in the hope of seeing an independent India, with all her diversity and cultures, which today, we’ve turned into a matter that can easily be decided by a single man. Let us not forget that the people who’re sitting in the chairs of the Parliament are our representatives, who we believe will not just develop our country as a whole but develop every individual’s life. Let us not forget that elections are not a competition between two political leaders to whom we’ve given the status of celebrities, but elections are the time we, the people remind them that the power resides in our hands, in the hands of the people and they are our representatives, nothing greater or smaller than that. Let us not forget that democracy has not given up yet, and neither should we give up democracy just because we couldn’t choose the right people at the right time. It is we, the people, who rule the rulers and we, the people, who let the rulers rule us. Let our decisions be wise, and the consequences, just.

Of the might in a point.

I could write poems upon poems,
Ink pages and pages and turn them into a book
That no one will ever read, maybe they’ll just glance through.
I could speak a million words from a thousand languages
And yet, it won’t be enough to quench the impatience of the fragile heart
Of the people who’ll never care to look upon these words, least bother to care for their existence.
On days like this, I am overwhelmed by my own love for the might I hold
To make or break; to create
Worlds and people, goodness out of a human heart,
Oceans and wars, love out of the human soul.
I wonder if my hands will remain till the day my heart starts to ache
For my tolerance is not infinite enough like these words, scattered in the void, waiting to be chosen for yet another story.
I hope that these words, moulded into my poems, are stronger than my ego to make me into whatever I wish the world and its people could be,
If they ever even glance through them.

Flower.

My soul is like a flower in the field,
Standing strong and alone through
Cold storms and scorching afternoons.
And all my bones are etched with these flowers
That guard me from myself, sometimes when I turn into the devil
That spoils the beauty of snow with blood.
The voice of my soul reaches out to the depths of guilt
Wherein lies my innocence, for which my heart mourns into a graveyard everyday.
My soul is tender, like a flower in the field,
My mind resting, and yet not unaware of when to rise up.
My soul is tender and mild, like hundreds of others,
Like hundreds of other souls, waiting to rise.