Unperfection by Shreya Manna Teaching myself how to unperfection Reminds me of that time I tried to do A water slide and chickened out only To sheepishly return because The queue I spotted on the other side Was way too long. And I was hoping To return to earth sometime very soon. In the little…
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Beneath my feet are crunching leaves, martyrs to the world’s law, And above me the canopy, shaking leafy branches in a tribal dance, Like a million green eyelashes in the sky’s eyes Nobody is listening. The gnarled limbs of the trees spread to claim the sky Gather the sun like gold, loot, I look up…
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Sometimes I feel like a waterfall wrestling with gravity I am heavy and torrential and endlessly crashing against granite. Somehow I spill into the canals dug by words, Slowing, a stream, rolling along soft clay. What I see is a stream of consciousness moving forward. What I see is the endless play of elements as…
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It shocks me beyond words to think of the horror that the girls in the Muzaffarpur children’s home in Bihar have faced. This poem cannot come close to expressing the damage that such sexual, mental and physical violence does. Nevertheless, I had to write about it. This poem is for those girls and their immeasurable…
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Monday afternoon, you step into the clamour of the school bus. You walk past the boys from the younger years busy with their usual jostling and jabbering. Peals of laughter pierce the air, mysterious objects are thrown around, and someone spills a packet of crisps on the floor. The older ones at the back are…
Read MoreIt is rare to find that one book on my reading list leads so effortlessly into the next one, but no sooner had I emerged from Hawthorne’s ‘The Scarlet Letter’ did I stumble upon ‘Unaccustomed Earth’ by Jhumpa Lahiri, opening with this vivid epigraph (above). Long having claimed her place on my ‘Favourite Authors’ shelf, Lahiri brings her skill with the short story form to a life of travel and rootlessness.
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The blog hath risen from its slumber! As I have had some free time over the Spring Break, I managed to scribble down this poem. This is inspired by some of my recent reading: Shakespeare’s ‘Marriage of True Minds’ and Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Valentine’.
Read MoreWith around 10 weeks to go before AS exams, life seems more like a ‘pandemonium of past papers and revision notes’ than a Paradise Prose. That’s not to say I’m not looking forward to the next few months, however, with a regional World Scholars Cup coming up (P is for pwaa and paradise…you guessed it),…
Read More“What had gone wrong with these first descendants of the first great ocean crossing experiment? Was there not a substantial garden area, regular meals, clean clothes from Marks ‘n’ Sparks, A class top-notch education?” These are the telling words of White Teeth by Zadie Smith. It’s not only a riotous panorama of multicultural England, but…
Read MoreDear Winter Wind by Shreya Manna
Dear winter wind
Can you hear my mind – by which I mean
The thoughts that tumble and tremble and clatter
like tea coasters slipping
off a high table?
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