Life in Quarantine: Witnessing Global Pandemic is an initiative sponsored by the Poetic Media Lab and the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis at Stanford University.
Fireflies
(Delhi, May 2021)
Yogesh Patel
Each plight of sparks enlightens a crackled sky
Ashes drifting in gasps
The oxygen never arrived
like promises and hopes
But there’s plenty for Hades
in the hellhole, a car park
though concocted with stench
charred flesh burning dashed hopes
A doctor comes out for a smoke
but runs back inside
filled with the dead lurking
in his lungs as ashes
Alfresco the wood-fireflies
pop in the cloud of fetid smoke
indoors the unattended dead
wait under the sign No Smoking
(This poem appears in poet’s collection, The Rapids, published by The London Magazine in October 2021: https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/product/the-rapids-by-yogesh-patel/)
Back to normal
It is not a fruit.
But it has fallen off the tree with a stone.
Just because it has fallen off the tree
it is categorised as a fruit. For days, no one bothered. The rumour is moths ate all leaves. The trees mutated as the viruses do!
These latest nuts have plagued the grounds I walk on.
Squirrels cannot classify the pits for their need.
Despairing, they all huddle up on roads quiet in the pandemic.
The conference like all others ends in disagreements. They all agreed to ignore the rare pits as nature’s bizarre idea! Though they must be all happy
having had the chance to read their papers without Zoom. They returned to their brushwood
in search of routine conkers like all academics waiting to see what happens to the odd harvest.
With squirrels deserting the roads, I feel safe now from rabies. Though, not from the roads overrun with the excess crop. All politics played, the council removed them. The arborists found the treatment, sprayed the trees, and killed the lab moths.
In the world of conkers, it is now easy for me
to come and see you But as before, I will only text you.
(This poem has been included on Royal Society of Literature’s Poetry Wall 2021:https://rsliterature.org/poems-map/back-to-normal/
The poem also appears in poet’s collection, The Rapids, published by The London Magazine in October 2021: https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/product/the-rapids-by-yogesh-patel/)
Yogesh Patel has received an MBE for literature. He has co-edited Skylark magazine since 1969. Currently, he runs Skylark Publications UK and the Word Masala Foundation. Honoured with Freedom of the City of London, he has LP records, films, radio, children’s book, fiction, non-fiction books, and three poetry collections to his credit. In 2019, he was a Poet-of-Honor at New York University. The House of Lords and the National Poetry Library have staged his readings. Amidst many, PN Review, The London Magazine, and BBC TV and Radio have published his work. So have also, numerous anthologies featured his poems, including National Curriculum, MacMillan, Sahitya Akademi and others..
You can find Yogesh on his websites PatelYogesh and SkylarkPublications
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