POETRY EDITOR Ananya S Guha’s note: Sabreen Ahmed’s poems talk about silence and the surroundings. There is a lull in the environment, especially after the invasion of Covid 19. Yet life renews itself and remarkably.

Dihing Patkai is no longer at Ease     

 Time is appallingly vibrant 

as the earth wears the attire  

of the verdure spring

and the rain lushed woods  

dance and sing

in the Amazon of the east ,

 Dihing patkai is no longer at ease,

for somebody has no promise to keep,

while others shall rage a green war

 no fire to cease.

And the rest are on

to mine coal

as their covetous goal

And the hypocrite public ‘us’

have hardly any defining role .                                                                                                                                    

 —                                                                                                                

#Song of a quarantine lover for the mob#

Love  in quarantine

 no less supine

 tone of complacence

or tenor of indifference,

in events or places

or in feelings and faces.

And the world is round

with contagious cases. 

 The lonely lover lunatic

lynched or not lynched,

 or disgraced-

 now the maniac fanatic,

 sleeping or moving

tested  and contested,

beaten and powerless,

 in the bog,

like the life of a hog,

merciless is the mob who

ignominiously attack to rob

 the poor lovers sob,

all out of the illusion of magic 

in times marked as tragic.    

—

#Locked Out#     

 Waking up to mornings without rush,

to the singing of   cuckoo’s

and machines all hush

the raindrops pour and I watch with ease 

but there are hundreds of others

 helpless walking miles on

with sun, wind and rain

hunger has evaded their pain

 away to desperation 

with the fear of infectious transmission 

fighting against fate 

marching ahead with or without hate   

In the morbid existing race

of living with disgrace.

 lips are all dry 

even at death they can’t cry.   

No work no pay no home to stay

hunger takes them to places far away.

We are locked down in

to escape the coffin

and they are locked out  

with poverty their premival sin.

— 

(Dr. Sabreen Ahmed has received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi in Feb 2013. Her Thesis is entitled “Muffled Voices: The Zenana in the Fiction of Muslim Women Writers from South Asia”.She has done her post- graduation from the University of Delhi (2005) and graduation from Cotton College, Guwahati (2003). Her area of interest is Gender studies, South Asian English Writing and Contemporary Theory. She has published an anthology of poems entitled Soliloquies and edited a seminar proceeding in book form captioned Indian Fiction in English and the Northeast. She writes for The Assam Tribune,The Thumbprint,Cafedissensus etc. Currently she teaches in the Dept of English, Nowgong College, Nagaon, Assam.  )