Preface : Here are words and lines by me ; Dr pragya suman, doctor and author from India wants to introduce the background of my creativity craft which came in a tiny poetry collection “ COVID CUBE “. Beside getting face to face the tormentic condition of pandemic in my medical profession , I also scanned the scathing acts of society, corruption which spiked during these calamities. I also got infected at my working place and for a considerable period I lived in home quarantine , apart from my family members and six year daughter.
It came like a self exploration phase and in stark silence I felt words dropping down and I collected them in various genres of poetry. I wrote in verse, prose poem, visual poetry, minimalist poetry and concrete poetry.
“ COVID CUBE “ is poetic documentation of my pandemic past peregrination. I wrote ten poems of multigenre, out if six are in word form and rest four are visual poetry.
The language spoken in the lab
Descended down
Upon the erected mango leaves
Of my fathers’s orchard
Coagulated there in protein shuttle
Corona hided heaped up in trans dictionary
And that day like almond seed scattered sharded
Out of pickled jar
I saw the letters got alienated
As every people in this pandemic
Letters liberated out of language
And stacked like draughtsman coin
Upon my auricle. I am still awaiting
let it in
Hear the voice of lord.
I decipher dear…!
The letters of my little
Littered in
Crayons colours
Are realistic
She put daily at doorstep
Of my quarantine room
Begin to fly like surreal–
And tinkles–
Dissecting the deafening silence.
The bacilli of Algerian Oran
laid in
oblivion of ocean
has come in another way_
Trite of absurdism
has gone
in a meandering
vicious ray. But now this
covid 19 is spluttering–
the stone of the staggering silly Sisyphus
Bacilli beaches are basking
in naked beauty
of comely ” Camus “
I know Sisyphus would smile again.
The guests are standing
in yard
holding a hollow cup.
I am in
with a coffee sachet.
A saturnine setting–
plundering the planet.
The virus breaks
its curse
locked in the plasma.
The parturient land and wrinkled hand smeared in sweat, takes one year to make mounds of lentils, veggies, rice and wheats, the democratic demons engulf in mere one gulp because they are balking in glory of an eagle emperor. The food given to medic servants shrivels in one fist, though they are in mountains on government paper . One Day I saw a lot of crows are appointed as admins in this dungeon, because they have developed eerie entrails with a silencer !
I read in biology book crows engulf without chewing, but crows of my country belch in a magical wand, so they don’t even make a sound . Chewing makes sound so they are silent engulfer not chewer.
Nowadays their nests are teeming in coins of corona.
The dark hole was pale in self isolation and my virtual world got banished in a virus cube. Nowadays I live there and yes I sometimes rove my eyes left and right as vitreous fluid is stagnant in muddy iris. Night descends upon curved eyelids and I have for one month seen stars scuttering like skylarks here.
You know I am insomniac now and so I am a watcher in the playground. Being an audience to self makes a blue prism. The cold castle , though I am still pink there as autumn is my favorite . My fragile fingers stop between platter and mouth as they tuck in tremor. I am hungry now though my fridge is stuffed.
One day it happened two stars clogged in my dark hole and i saw a shriveled women was sitting in one dimension with wrapped face in pestle white towel.
Virus slept on my medic palms and i am covid positive now.
Dr Pragya Suman is a doctor by profession and an award winning author from India. She is posted now as Senior Resident in Shri krishna Medical College, Muzaffarpur, Bihar, India. Writing is her passion which she inherited from her father. She also writes short stories and reviews which have been published in many magazines and anthologies. Surrealism, prose poetry, and free verse are her favourite genres. Recently she won the Gideon poetry award for her debut book Lost Mother . Dr Pragya Suman is Editor in Chief, Arc Magazine, India.
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.
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