Musings of Desire: Poems

By Amit Radha Krishna Nigam

See through times bleary glass, a little beyond in the past,
Within the corners of our living rooms
Memories are sweetly nesting.
They have made a house within our houses,
basking in the glorious light, or reclining
upon the soft couch in the shed.

From examining the nostalgia of love, to muse upon the memories of losses and pains, this, Amits third collection of poems and verses, is even richer and poignant. While at times, it is engaging, devotional and philosophical, at other times, it also observes quietly the nature of our contemporary world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing India
• Release date: Dec 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482859591

Amit Radha Krishna Nigam

Amit Radha Krishna Nigam is the Author of English Poetry collections ‘Pilgrims’ and ‘Awake Wonder and lost’. This is his third poetry book. Amit works in an MNC, currently based out of Hyderabad. He can be reached at [e-mail] and he tweets at @imaginovationz

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Amit Radha Krishna Nigam.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4828-5960-7

               eBook          978-1-4828-5959-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/india

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface to this collection

I. NOT Sonnets

II. Musings of Desire

1.   After a long time

2.   Farewell my friend

3.   This much and more

4.   An old sigh

5.   On imagining you

6.   Without a word

7.   The loss of a church

8.   Your Absence

9.   Saturday Afternoon

10.   Your memories

11.   Soon the world shall blind your memory

12.   Apprehensions of Mistrust

13.   Homeless birds

14.   Stubborn love

15.   How long before your memory would cease?

16.   You don’t leave me

17.   Pampering

18.   I crave for you

19.   Your sweet memory

20.   The Mender of Heart

21.   Musings of Desire

22.   You hold my soul

23.   You cannot lie to me

24.   As I knew her a long time ago

25.   A broken necessity

26.   Memories still know

27.   Nostalgia

28.   Distractions of Void

29.   Giving up on apartment hunting

30.   This valentine, in the happiest hour

31.   ExMeeting

32.   Timestamps of words

33.   Just a waste emotion now

34.   From here and nowhere else

35.   A painful wait

36.   Your Words

37.   Visiting your place once

38.   After a Separation

39.   Go

40.   No More

41.   Distances

42.   A Loss compensated

43.   I was awake

44.   When you left

45.   Winter Night

46.   Breaking the glasses of winds

47.   An Exchanged kiss

48.   Sixty years from now.

49.   I am Happy

50.   I have loved you.

51.   With you

52.   Only a few days remain

53.   A Lost struggle

54.   If you fail to come today

55.   A cry of my soul

56.   My hands are busy rasping my heart

57.   A walk with you

58.   Talk to me

59.   Forgetfulness

60.   Is it a wound that can be healed?

61.   Memory is a city of unrecalled layers

62.   Phonebook

63.   Stonehearts

64.   Once I was in love with her

65.   Memory shifts

III. By the docks

1.   Reconstructing Square

2.   A Witness Tree

3.   Goodbyes

4.   Treasure.

5.   An Introduction to Friendship

6.   End of summers

7.   An overflow

8.   Recollected and Repaired

9.   End of a beautiful relation

10.   A Cry

11.   The gift of love - 1

12.   It is impossible to love and to be wise

13.   Partings

14.   The Gift of love - II

15.   But we can always be near.

16.   Let’s pick up those trashed letters from the bin

17.   Mornings without you

18.   Threshold of Memories

19.   Todays and yesterday’s memories

20.   Little kisses of fondness.

21.   Possessions

22.   To my Friend

23.   You and I, and the things that bind us.

24.   Ignorance

25.   I forgive you

26.   One cloistered night

IV. Our World

1.   Upon the porch*

2.   More Divine

3.   A Privileged voice

4.   Fear not, for I am here.

5.   An another scam

6.   A story of our comforts

7.   Where are my roots?

8.   Reminiscence of Civilizations

9.   At the beginning of Indian Philosophy

10.   Divorce

11.   Some tempered faiths

12.   Recycling

13.   A daily routine

14.   A Poor Master

15.   I stopped killing mosquitoes because I can’t.

16.   Questions on Unethical Progress

17.   Preventing Malaria

18.   Awards

19.   Fantasy

20.   City’s Horizon.

21.   Karma

22.   Helicopter

V. From The Book of Poetry

1.   Only If

2.   Let me savor every drop of this nether hour

3.   When I am not reading poetry

4.   A matter of rhyme

5.   How do I begin writing poetry?

6.   Rubies for us

7.   The final resting place

VI. From the Book of Krishna and other verses

1. Vrindavandesha

2. From the Book of Krishna

3. God’s faithful

4. A beloved’s messenger

5. The essence of a Kshatriya

6. The Essence of the mystic devout Sudama

7. The Essence of Prahalad

8. The Essence of Radhika

9. The Essence of the Matsya Avatar

10. The essence of celibacy

11. The essence of Ramayana

12. The Essence of Peace

VII. Untitled

1.   On Egoism

2.   Indifferences

3.   The trouble with hobbies

4.   Snake Dreams

5.   Then step into your father’s shoe

6.   Happiness (for otherwise sake)

7.   Curator of Hope

8.   Death is a silent hum in the music of life

9.   Idleness

10.   A Moment

11.   Land of quicksand

12.   Septic Thoughts

13.   At the Conveyor belt

14.   For Nick Vujicic and others

15.   Brahamachari

16.   Dorothy Parker

17.   The story of two primeval Elements - Hydrogen and Oxygen.

18.   A girl is singing in my head

19.   All things will die

VIII. My Heart Cries Today

1.   O’ howling dog

2.   On Sorrows

3.   A Substantial loss

4.   Before winters

5.   Before a Suicide

IX. Musing on Obituaries

1.   Sky’s Leak – For the people of Bhopal

2.   A hawker’s eyes

3.   A slumber that will never break

4.   Attacks

5.   Loosing Will

6.   On Farmers Suicide

7.   A Crying Gaijatra

8.   This is the point where he left his words

X. The Nature of a Seeker

XI. From the Notebook

XII. Some SONGS and VERSES

For my family.

For Krishiv (duggu), the new one.

And for those around the world who suffer, endure

and come out better.

Acknowledgements

This has been a long journey. Thanks to my family, Smt Shobha Nigam, Dr. Radha Krishna Nigam, Rahul (chotu), Pooja didi and Shri Mohit Srivastava for their ceaseless support and love throughout.

Heartfelt acknowledgement is also made to hundreds of readers around the world of the allpoetry.com site where few poems of this collection have previously appeared and appreciated. It gave me good courage to include them in this book.

To the four pillars of a writer’s atelier – MS word (or open Office as in my case), Laptop, coffee and solitude.

I would also like to thank the Editors and designers of this book, who worked to give it the best look possible.

To my god, Krishna, I thank you last but not the least.

Preface to this collection

I believe that there is no other artistic expression closer to soul as poetry. At times it speaks to us in the most saddest or happiest ways possible, but then, at other times, it speaks none at all. It crawls deepest yet remains afloat. It wrenches yet soothes. It hurts yet medicates. It cries to our wounds yet offers them a delight. It listens to our heart and let it speak, yet remains a mute spectator and gambles with our thoughts.

And in poetry, Love, Longings and nostalgia are perhaps the most realized, beautifully experimented and caressed upon themes that poets have used to express themselves all over the world and not just in recent times, but since the time modern poetry entered its renaissance. These emotions conquer our memory like no other will of nature. They command our dreams and shape our thoughts and even our convictions of right and wrong, our notions of morality and sympathy and what not. Emotions, when they touch us deep, become a hunter that whip as they want and we dance, and signatures of our moves appear in the poems that we write. Poetry contains the flesh and blood of the rhythm in poet’s lives and the characters of their dreams and nightmares.

And Wonderment. And craziness.

And often poets have passed their skills on to the generations, as the permanent losses or gains of inheritance and poetry, then seem to live forever.

Although, so much of their craftsmanship and wealth do poets have spent on the poetry of love, sadness, wars, and nostalgia in emotionally charged and powerfully intense ways, yet I find there is no ending of the ways in which poets write still and will continue to write about love. Even today, every love poem attempts to alter or expand the previously rich imagery of the love, if not more but must, in the minds of its readers. At times sweet-as-honey and at times sour-as-bitter-melon, love can be both nectar to the throat and a venom. And as such, we, as poets, love to drink it full whatever its taste may be. Also because love, both as a subject and a theme, presents to us an infinite vast canvas for our imagination to take unconventional shapes. And hence, Poems of love (and memories that are borne out of it) dominates this collection as well.

As far as the question of ‘How this collection is organized’, I begin this collection with 5 poems that are written in Shakespearean sonnet structure (3 quatrains and 1 voila couplet in the end). But since they do not follow either an iambic-pentameter or any other specific sonnet metric pattern and hence I have called them ‘Not sonnets’ for they are as such. The biggest section of this collection, ‘Musings of desire’, is the heart and soul of this collection. Poems of love, separation, nostalgia, lamenting, loss, and of course of memories are predominant. It mostly contains lyrical poems as against descriptive or epic (narrative) forms for the simple reason that short impulses of thoughts are best described by this form of poetry. It includes my work over the last one and a half year after Pilgrims was published in Feb ’14. I did not stopped writing love poems when Pilgrims was out and so in many ways, I felt as if I am writing Pilgrims all over again just with different words and fresh emotions. However, there are a few differences in this collection in the way poems are organized and presented.

First, as unlike before, they are now divided and categorized into sections to emphatically suit their mood and tone. Another minor difference is that the titles of all the poems appear afterwards. This may look a little crazy and experimental, I know, but I have my own reasons for that (as all craziness does).

One thing that is not changed though is that I have again avoided, as far as possible, using pretentious words. Not because it’s a part of my craft, but simply because I don’t know enough still. Pity me. But also because one of the feedbacks for Pilgrims was that