COLLAGE – A POEM FOR OUR TIMES.

No poet can exist in utter isolation from the larger socio-political ethos, that’s a learned fact. Apolitical we may be or even sometimes non-committal as individuals but as writers, our subconscious mind records so much from the headlines and common conversations as also our internal monologues that the page becomes our only canvas on which we collect a collage of the many influences we see informing our worldviews. In the act of writing, we give rise to a compactness, a collectivity of emotional articulation expressed through words.

The poem I share here today was written by me and published as one of the many final works on my poetry collection WHISTLING CHIMES on Wattpad, in 2016, a year which was personally one of tumult for me and as it turned out by the end of it we were all shocked by  world-changing events. It’s fittingly called COLLAGE since the universal is always an ally of the particular experience and the other way around too.



God knows, we haven’t come a long way since that year and the events of hate and racism informing George Floyd’s death have made us come full circle at the singularity of the human experience amidst a global pandemic, no less.

On my way back from college, on a solitary rickshaw ride to home three years back, the words came to me and I wrote it down in one flow as soon as I reached my room. It was an amalgamation of universal factors reaching my pen.

So this is my way of reflecting these tensile times and a historical view of the world’s inequities. Brave are those who are standing up for the truth even as we remain cooped up by the chokeholds of fear, disease and death. But nothing is as glaring as the senseless puncturing of another mortal life by a fellow being. This is the collage of our times as it has always been.

READ ‘COLLAGE’ IN THE LINK BELOW, SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS AND SPREAD THE MESSAGE OF TRUTH.






https://www.wattpad.com/289896514-whistling-chimes-collage

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The photos included in this post are courtesy the webpages of CNN and THE NEW YORKER respectively, taken from Google.