Authors

Stille Nacht

April 27, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

“Listen, Fritz is singing to us.”
Across the pitted mounds of No Man’s Land
the gentle blending of a male voice choir
hushed, and reverently sweet and sad
gave Stille Nacht instead of rifle fire.
“Come all ye faithful,” Englishmen replied,
and found the German voices had joined in
“Venite adoremus,” strong and clear.
Loyalties and faiths were fused as one.
Ignoring language, everybody knew
some message without words had been received,
more primitive than language, swift as thought.
Who was that lonely figure standing high
tempting man to shoot him down,
silhouetted, stark against the sky?
“Tommy,” he called, “A Happy Christmas to you.”
Everybody knows what happened next,
how one man’s voice had neutralised a war,
how both sides fraternised in No Man’s Land
and shared a trust that one had dared before.
It took two days to reassert command.
Then Brass hats drove both trenches back to war,
for soldiers only had their lives to lose,
their officers had wealth they valued more.

George Wilson

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The Headache

April 18, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

My head doth ache,
O Sappho! take
Thy fillet,
And bind the pain,
Or bring some bane
To kill it.

But less that part
Than my poor heart
Now is sick;
One kiss from thee
Will counsel be
And physic.

Robert Herrick (baptized 24 August 1591 – buried 15 October 1674

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Le Chat

April 17, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

Viens, mon beau chat, sur mon coeur amoureux;
Retiens les griffes de ta patte,
Et laisse-moi plonger dans tes beaux yeux,
Mêlés de métal et d'agate.


Lorsque mes doigts caressent à loisir
Ta tête et ton dos élastique,
Et que ma main s'enivre du plaisir
De palper ton corps électrique,


Je vois ma femme en esprit. Son regard,
Comme le tien, aimable bête


Profond et froid, coupe et fend comme un dard,
Et, des pieds jusques à la tête,
Un air subtil, un dangereux parfum
Nagent autour de son corps brun.


Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)


Come, my fine cat, to my amorous heart;
Please let your claws be concealed.
And let me plunge into your beautiful eyes,
Coalescence of agate and steel.


When my leisurely fingers are stroking your head
And your body's elasticity,
And my hand becomes drunk with the pleasure it finds
In the feel of electricity,


My woman comes into my mind. Her regard
Like your own, my agreeable beast,
Is deep and is cold, and it splits like a spear,


And, from her head to her feet,
A subtle and dangerous air of perfume
Floats always around her brown skin.

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The Garden

April 15, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

She is coming, my own, my sweet;
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead,
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.


Alfred Lord Tennyson

Excerpt from "Maud"

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Remembering Pwllheli

April 14, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

When Cymri say
“Pwllheli”
I hear again
the pebbly ripple and lap
blessing the shore.
No human voice, no engine roar
only the thin cries of arctic tern
ganneting the sea.


Across Tremadoc Bay
Snowdonia’s curtain of cloud
blacked out war.
The still air
calm as the prayers
of a thousand Celtic saints
cleansed my head
of death, of furnace fires,
so many missing friends.
The world was still at war but
Pwllheli
was elsewhere.


George Wilson

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Jamaica is One Love

April 12, 2013 Rasel Rana 1 Comments


One Love in children born
from a mother's voice calm as a river
in Ghana; a father's hands rough
as Scotland's shale; a brother's arms
strong as bamboo from Shaanxi ; a sister's
shoulders resilient as banyans from Nepal.


One Love is whispering streams,
waving ferns, winding roads through green
valleys that surprise
with a drop into turquoise waters.


One Love is the fathers and mothers
who every day harvest food and drink
for their children from the bounty
of the earth and evergiving sea.


One Love is a people in the midst
of blue mountains and orange sunsets
who stitch together sun and rain
into a thundering silence
to soothe our minds and souls.


One Love is to have known pain,
yet refusing to surrender to sorrow,
and abandoning ourselves to joy.


One Love is the spirit in which we live
One Love


Geoffrey Philp


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A Slow Train to Gwalior, Loving, Living, Loving

April 12, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

i think of you many a times
of you and a summer
like many other summers
hustle of a retreating shadow
just before the dark
like an ancient rite
traveling
your touch remains
in an innate stone
carved on
such sky dotted days
a river once stormed in
a chimera blue evening
at gwalior
when you
told me of roses
named after your mother
and stars in gorges
of the fort
of forests in
laburnum laughter
of many others
still afloat
and
since then
i had named you
my words
and every stop street
that relinquished itself
every sun birth that lived
has been only you
and nights that stayed back
still remains you
every stoneburnt campaign years of the fort
is you
every eye in hesitation
of a reprieve
will be you
and you shall ever remain
the swirling
dawn curled
in dreamscapes of
such long summers.

my lips have tracked in
unison on your neck
you and
age old rivalries on such a savage
day

Amitabh Mitra



A Poetry Film by Amitabh Mitra. Based on the above love poem

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Cowslips At Verdun

April 11, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

At last they fade from sight, those fields
of white crosses, rigid, regimented,
on parade. But now the Sacred Way
cuts through woodland, dense as battle-smoke,
concealing still the threat of instant death.
Here the war continues, birch and alder
inter-strangle with their tangled limbs;
some in shell holes stand like moated forts
flooded nearly ninety years ago.
Some defend a blast-heaped mound of mud,
undetonated weapons, metal waste
and chips of bone from countless unknown graves.
Occasionally through these haunted woods
officialdom has hacked and flattened lawns
as if to gentrify barbarity.
On each firebreak greensward cowslips peal
their yellow bells and sway seductive stems
so unconcerned, so innocently proud
that instantly, from thirty years ago
I hear Joan Baez singing her lament
where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flowers every one.
When will they ever learn?
Perhaps in Viet Nam days this could appear
a plea for common sense, but not again.
The song is so much older than the Nam.
These are cowslips of reality.
Their innocent persistence now declares
our lemming-like obsession has no end.
All is passion-driven, irrepressible,
unreasoned, uncontrollable, unchecked
from flowers to girls to young men waging war
to cowslips blowing kisses on their graves.

George Wilson

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Spring

April 10, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

Spring, and the wispy clouds that fade away
And draw the ecstatic soul in pain to aspire
In maddening flight through heaven’s thin flood of fire
To melt in rapture at the heart of day,
The powers of the world that promise and betray
Have dragged me from you in their icy ire
And set me spinning at their loom, for hire,
The shroud in which my senses must decay.
For hire I give myself, and cannot tell
If the blind force that flings me in the chest
Have power or will to pay the bargained price,
Yet for a word of love I gladly quell
The quivering hope of not inactive rest
And very humbly make my sacrifice.


John Le Gay Brereton (2 September 1871 – 2 February 1933)

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Breasal The Fisherman

April 09, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

Although you hide in the ebb and flow
Of the pale tide when the moon has set,
The people of coming days will know
About the casting out of my net,
And how you have leaped times out of mind
Over the little silver cords,
And think that you were hard and unkind,
And blame you with many bitter words


William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939)

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Tonight I can write the saddest lines

April 08, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write for example: ‘The night is fractured
and they shiver, blue, those stars, in the distance’

The night wind turns in the sky and sings.
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
I loved her, sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like these I held her in my arms.
I kissed her greatly under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could I not have loved her huge, still eyes.

I can write the saddest lines tonight.
To think I don’t have her, to feel I have lost her.

Hear the vast night, vaster without her.
Lines fall on the soul like dew on the grass.

What does it matter that I couldn’t keep her.
The night is fractured and she is not with me.

That is all. Someone sings far off. Far off,
my soul is not content to have lost her.

As though to reach her, my sight looks for her.
My heart looks for her: she is not with me

The same night whitens, in the same branches.
We, from that time, we are not the same.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the breeze to reach her.

Another’s kisses on her, like my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body, infinite eyes.

I don’t love her, that’s certain, but perhaps I love her.
Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long.

Since, on these nights, I held her in my arms,
my soul is not content to have lost her.

Though this is the last pain she will make me suffer,
and these are the last lines I will write for her.

Pablo Neruda (12 July 1904 – 23 September 1973 Chile)

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Beyond The Sea

April 07, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

Beyond the sea, beyond the sea,
My heart is gone, far, far from me;
And ever on its track will flee
My thoughts, my dreams, beyond the sea.

Beyond the sea, beyond the sea,
The swallow wanders fast and free:
Oh, happy bird! were I like thee,
I, too, would fly beyond the sea.

Beyond the sea, beyond the sea,
Are kindly hearts and social glee:
But here for me they may not be;
My heart is gone beyond the sea.

Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866)

 

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An Alteration In The Way I Breathe

April 04, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

we crossed the mountains
with the rising of the sun
the dawn racing ahead of us
like a mad horse

on the other side
the valley
the river
the trees
a whole landscape
bathed
in early sunlight
still shivering
with the breathing of night

I wondered
why the weights
had gone from my shoulders
why the guns and knives
had rusted in my belt

our eyes were laughing
our mouths were singing

and as we descended
the withered grass
became green and full
crowning in stalks
with a multitude of flowers

©Peter Finch from ”Selected Poems” Page 13, Poetry Wales Press 1987

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Carnival Nights

April 04, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

an evening creaks in
touching shadows with a tinge
of smile
a slow release laughter
aloe and wild grass shake to
jazz moments
tiredness breaks its shackles
ran the curves of a distant sun
words lost its way home
as usual
a poem unwound itself
from an angle of your eye
mdantsane bursts itself in a mayhem
of another carnival night.

Amitabh Mitra

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poem and Painting by Amitabh Mitra

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Reflections

April 02, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

Drag me from this place of peace
And force on me your solitude
Drown my cares with guilt and pain
My heart it's dreams will ere elude.

Dream now the dream that wakes my soul
To days when love will reign once more
The breeze that dissipates hate and fear
Recalls now what the heart is for.

Breathe hope into this broken life
Step softly into darkened rooms
Disturbing not the sleeping fate
Who dreams future bliss for love that blooms.

The heart unbiased, beats within
Swells and fades with ardent sway
Around the time that dreams begin
As twilight now to night gives way.

© 2011 Yvonne Evanoff

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To Be Read In The Morning And At Night

April 01, 2013 Rasel Rana 0 Comments

My love
Has told me
That he needs me.

That's why
I take good care of myself
Watch out where I'm going and
Fear that any drop of rain
Might kill me.

Bertolt Brecht (1898 – 1956)

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