GAS Featured Poet: Mukut Borpujari

Mukut Borpujari is a graduate in English Literature and hold a Masters in Computer Application (MCA) from G.G. University, Bilashpur, CG. Based in Guwahati, Assam, INDIA, he has a plethora of poems published in top journals including The Canyon Voices Literary Magazine of the Arizona State University. He was also longlisted in this year's Erbacce-prize for poetry 2024. An active member of the Greenpeace Movement, he has a deep-rooted conviction about nature and the natural world. Apart from being an avid reader, his other hobbies include Computers & internet, and Driving. 

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The Rebel 

With a flagrant disregard for existing social norms, 

something’s brewing in the anvil of thought. 

Wild rhododendrons and bougainvilleas running 

along the wall, 

as we denounce the barriers of casteism and marginalization. 

No to the elite. 

No to centuries of limiting beliefs and traditions, 

their insistence—the shackles of our own minds. 

At midnight, 

in the waning light of the stars in the sky, 

the silhouette of our necks interlocked like flamingos. 

I miss you. I never even met you: 

let us take a deep dive into our imaginations, 

until we find the right imagery and metaphors 

we can discuss—dissect; 

not for ego’s sake, but for love. 

GAS Featured Poet: Vidya Hariharan

 Vidya Hariharan is a manic reader and traveller. In her spare time, she wrestles with crossword puzzles. Some of her work can be found on Poem Hunter, Setu, Poetry Superhighway, Muse India’s Your Space, Glomag, Café Dissensus, Borderless, Poems India, Pan Haiku Review, Contemporary Haiku Online and Under the Basho. Her poems Beauty and Open Heart Surgery have been selected as Editor’s Pick for July and September 2024 respectively.  She also won the Editor’s Choice Award for her haiku from Under the Basho in 2024.

Breakdown

It hits you in the middle of the road,

Mid-step, in broad daylight, cars

Whizzing by, honking angrily.

You force your reluctant feet 

To move out of the way,

With blurry eyes you watch 

As pedestrians push past you.

Nothing sinks in, in your current state.

Someone warned you this would happen,

The tears will flow, the grief will come,

When you least expect it, striking deadly

Like a punch in the gut, debilitating.

 

Can I sit here and weep by the streetlamp,

Rest my weighty head on the lap of night

With my back against the smooth metal

And let my pent-up tears run and wet my neck?

Oh, I forgot to bring a handkerchief this morning.

Didn’t foresee a breakdown in the evening.

 

His face was turned to the wall, away from me

When he breathed his last. did he reject me?

Why did we argue? I am an impatient bitch.

Unaware of my moans and splutters I weep 

Into my cupped hands, with pale fingers 

Pressing my eyes, my forehead pleated with grief.

Remembrance

Cooking scents fill the air,

Father is at it again,

Loaded counters gleam, 

The kitchen is off limits, 

But grandkids sneak out

With icing on their chin,

Moms gather in the garden

Share their tales of old,

Dads sort the Christmas tree

Sharing in the camaraderie,

While Mother smiles on

From her picture on the mantel.

GAS Featured Poet: Ma Yongbo

Ma Yongbo was born in 1964,Ph.D,representative of Chinese avant-garde poetry,and a leading scholar in Anglo-American poetry.He has published over eighty original works and translations since 1986 included 7 poetry collections.He focused on translating and teaching Anglo-American poetry and prose including the work of Dickinson, Whitman, Stevens, Pound, Williams and Ashbery. He recently published a complete translation of Moby Dick, which has sold over half a million copies. He teaches at Nanjing University of Science and Technology. The Collected Poems of Ma Yongbo (four volumes, Eastern Publishing Centre, 2024) comprising 1178 poems, celebrate 40 years of writing poetry.

Line by line retranslation of Ashbery 

Waiting makes time democratic, you just said so

Then a white horse ran by, repeatedly running back and forth

Like a messenger passing straight through various rooms from the front door

Out through the back door, I waited like this for twenty-seven years.

Initially it was the honey of distortion brewed in the rooms distorted in your convex mirror

And that gesture was both an invitation and a refusal

Unfolding for me a moment that fluctuated incessantly

A crack that exists, the circulation of water in the ocean

A ring formed by a self-devouring serpent in motion 

In between is the void filled with power

This mirror of others reflects oneself at the same time

Allows all the images of leaves stacked in the depths of the mirror to remain

Like a demon in a bottle floating on an infinitely transparent surface

Longing for the light of your face, symbolic stones

They only stop temporarily in order to focus

Forming some kind of meaning, then they are quickly swept away

By the randomness of a hasty retrospective flood

This is more like a dream that a person struggles with but still cannot wake from

Maybe he doesn't really want to wake up

Finding himself in an uninhabited street

In the silence just as the last bus leaves

In the steam, the taillights flicker dimly

This is a climate without scenery, it is something nameless

Moving, appearing and disappearing, erasing some, and then adding some from the void

Adding something, originally the messenger and the message were one

How to receive the infinite return of the Möbius strip

What you have experienced, you know nothing about

And poetry is an understanding of this pain, and also a forgetting

Whether the reward is a reed flute, or separation of body and head

It will all enter a distilled space

Like bees living in the nest of the sun

And these, whether they are enough for me

Pretending that nothing happened, continue to sing

This may be the barbarian plundering in Rome

Defined safe zone, several temples scattered on hills

Let us continue with determination

Tell others the symbolism, and show the mystery to ourselves