Sabreen Ahmed’s poems are about silence
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. )