Ruchira's Ramblings

NaPoWriMo Day 11, prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today, taking a leaf from Safia Elhillo’s work, we’d like to challenge you to write a poem of origin. Where are you from? Not just geographically, but emotionally, physically, spiritually? Maybe you are from Vikings and the sea and diet coke and angry gulls in parking lots. Maybe you are from gentle hills and angry mothers and dust disappearing down an unpaved road. And having come from there, where are you now? Happy (or at the very least, emotionally engaged) writing!" Safia Elhillo is a beautiful poet but I tried, people. 💁🏻‍♀️

#napowrimo Day 3. Prompt from napowrimo.net: "Today’s prompt is based in a poem by Larry Levis called “The Two Trees.” It is a poem that seems to meander, full of little digressions, odd bits of information, but fundamentally, it is a poem that takes time. It takes its time getting where it’s going, and the action of the poem itself takes place over months. Today, I’d like to challenge you to write something that involves a story or action that unfolds over an appreciable amount of time." This prompt stumped me for a bit, especially since I prefer writing shorter poems but what doing NaPoWriMo and then about eight months of weekly prompts with Airplane Poetry Movement has made me believe is that I can write on any prompts if I try, which is what the challenge is all about, after all. Apologies if this meanders too much and makes sense too little. Point is, I wrote a poem. In other news, two of my favourite poets, Shantanu Anand and Nandini Verma, the founders of A...

#1 "Write a poem that a young you needed to read." I found this poetry prompt for National Poetry Writing Month. Really nice prompt, except I was 3 days late. But it got me thinking. What poem would young me need to read? I mean, I have come across these pieces before – Letter to Young Me- but I’ve never given the idea much thought before. Perhaps because it was not my time yet for that contemplation. But tonight, disturbed, anxious, slightly depressed with my thoughts going where they shouldn’t, where I don’t want them to go, I am trying to think of what advice I could conjure up for a younger version of myself. At five, perhaps, don’t be so bitter For being always mocked at, For being made fun of, bullied, For being the youngest. We all grow up someday And frankly, it's overhyped. At ten, don’t try so hard To be nice, to be liked It won’t matter, in the long run In a few years you will wonder That you ever liked these people, An...

Childhood vanished like the bad man in a kid's film, leaving behind dissolving snapshots of the long bus-trip to the grandparents' home through a long empty road they called the Bypass. Then home changed, roads changed, people grew up, grew old, died. I remember once going back to visit with my dad- that first tiny apartment where my earliest memories are. A big yellow front door and limewashed walls with blue pathes of damp making maps of countries yet undiscovered, a calling bell tune surely dreamt up by a tone-deaf person somewhere and the ceiling fans from a company called 'Ranjan' that I pronounced 'Ran-Jan'. I thought all of that was mine. That all of it was forever. And then one day a truck arrived and we folded our world in straw-lined packing boxes and home became a goodbye in a flurry of moments that slipped out of incomprehending hands. When I went back a few years later everything looked different, though they were there as they had always been- t...