When I Make Space to Pause by Shreya Manna So. When I make space to pause, I listen. The bones at the base of my neck are instruments, Clicking and clacking and croaking under the weight of an uneasy head. My feet oscillate. Drumsticks on a d-d-d-d-drum roll. The mind scans and measures each line…
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I’m in a new apprenticeship – Not any intellectual shit, Reading ‘how to be a human’ lit: so flip to page 1, where I find it hard, really no way I can discard, this overconfidence in my inferiority. Too many syllables, (may not be believable) but it’s true. I cannot see the “awesome kid” inside…
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A poem about water-forms.
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Hello again, I’m back with (more) attempts at writing poetry and an update about starting Hilary Term (i.e. Term 2) at Oxford. Since I’ve been gone, I’ve been writing away for our weekly essays about everything including the lives of saints in Old English up until the modernist experiments of T.S. Eliot. I’ve taken up…
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Trees spilling with boughs of white flowers Like bright eyes, shrouded in the waxy palms of leaves I watch some fall, stolen by the breeze, I watch them fall (in love). Petals unfurling, they embrace the dusk with open arms, sprinkling the earth. Hush. Listen to them land: tiny, soft blankets for unseen slumbering fairies.…
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I wrote this poem in light of the events in the news recently that have made the word ‘home’ a politically charged one, and also as a memory of my personal experiences that put into question what home might be.
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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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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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How do I introduce this poem? It is about a beginning or an end that I will ever fully understand. It is about a poem in it’s own way; a human one, a memento of your heritage. What you are about to read is the humble attempt of a great-granddaughter, who, making her own way…
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