The teacher claimed it was so plain,
I only had to use my brain.
She said the past of throw was threw,
The past of grow – of course – was grew,
So flew must be the past of fly,
And now, my boy, your turn to try.
But when I trew,
I had no clue,
If mow was mew
Like know and knew
(Or [...]
Category Archives: Verse
Damn, you English language
Melancholy Maiden
Child of the pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love-gift of a fairy-tale.
I have not see thy sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter;
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy young life’s hereafter-
Enough that now thou wilt [...]
The Golden Gate – Vikram Seth
A bittersweet lovestory it’s in verse
of hope and sadness, jealousy and loss,
of love which always has hateful obverse,
set against the lovely Francisco canvas.
Language at once both beautiful and wise
set in the tetrameter’s confines,
a work as evocative as Monet,
unflinching rhymes, and refreshing sonnet.
Through joy and sorrow the characters drift,
like the unsure antics of fog and mist,
the [...]
Jabberwocky
How can anyone have the ignorance to presume that ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is a mere children story when Lewis Carrol has also given us Jabberwocky. A poem which is often hailed as the greatest nonsense poem ever written and which probably holds the record for the most number of new words introduced into the language [...]
I was reading ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’. A few lines worth sharing:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when [...]
Foggy and Gloomy
Wilde once said that all bad poetry is a result of honest emotions. Well… at least my poetry is bad… it’s in fact verse!
I wonder what to write on
in times of such distress,
with gloomy days and foggy nights
solitude lone buttress.
Specters rise in ghostly dance
from all engulfing mist,
I raise my hand to touch them all,
moisture my [...]
Anand
In one of the most poignant scenes in Bollywood history, a hyperventilating Rajesh Khanna says to a massively worried Amitabh Bachchan, ‘जो खत्म हो रहा है वो शरीर है।’ (That which is ending is the body) and follows it up with one of the most beautiful poems I’ve ever come across:
मौत तू एक कविता है,
मुझसे [...]
Chequered and Flagged
The pieces set gleaming in crimson light
the players sweat o’er impending fight
him taking black, it’s me who has the white
who gallantly gallops his gallant knight
He moves his pawn to gain the center stage
and my pawn brings us both on the same page
his knight, my bishop, such a trembling rage
histrionics nettling they do engage
We hunch over [...]
The curse of the iambic pentameter
You pick your pen and scratch your chin a bit
these wretched words frankly just would not fit
you’re growing gray rhyming cheater and peter
and stuffing them all in an iambic pentameter
Swallowing your pride with every ending ‘love’
with a helplessly crushed creativity you rhyme it with ‘dove’
but then ‘orange’ somehow finds its way to the end
and no [...]
Bird
Perched atop the open cage
ruminating over freedom
nostalgic taste of iron below
and a slightly confused gaze.
she eyes the enslaved liberation
and the illusion of independence,
humanity-her every breath
polluted with myriad obligation.
sorrow masked as hope
punctuating the pursuit of happiness
with sorrow in such abundance
how can I ever cope ?
then she flaps her wings and flies
enters the cage and sings:
this hopeless [...]