Suparna Ghosh has published three books of poetry - Sandalwood Thoughts, a collection of poems and drawings; Dots and Crosses, a prose poem with CD, and Occasionally, which features poems in free verse and ghazals in classical Indo-Persian style, one of which has been translated into Urdu, set to music for a CD, and made into four short videos. Her poems have been published in local and international literary journals. Suparna was short-listed for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and published in their Global Poetry Anthology. Her poem, Dance of the Goddess, won the grand-prize at the Artists Embassy International’s Dancing Poetry competition and was recited, choreographed and staged in the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 2012. She has exhibited her paintings in Toronto, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, Mumbai and New Delhi.
Please visit: www.suparnaghosh.com
Sometimes, sounds are more mesmerizing than the words they emanate from. You may not even understand them, but they emote a primordial sensation from a past you may have traversed once. Perhaps the form of poetry known as a ghazal vivifies this awareness more than any other. Or more likely, this is just a biased view from an ardent lover of this poetic form. Love animates the most inanimate.
A ghazal is separate from other kinds of beautiful poetry just as an abstract painting is distinct from a realistic one.
It is an amalgam of couplets, each separate and complete, yet linked together and entirely harmonious. In all its mystical, mournful, romantic and maudlin glory, it rises like a structure, yet remains fluid in rhythm, like a slow-moving river. Internal rhymes woven in exactly the same pattern, each taking its cue from the first couplet, yet, uncontrived, unimpeded, natural.
Embracing the tenets which bind it, yet never a slave to what defines it:
Even the breeze is an intrusion when you and I meet
Like a ship on the horizon where the earth and sky meet
Your eyes trace my form on the yellow and red sand
Where the roar of the waves and the gull’s cry meet
When your madness brews it’s like a distant storm
With shuttered eyes I wait till you and I meet
Your desolate words scatter in the wayward wind
And I watch across the bridge as a song and sigh meet
Now your lights are dim and your sails are limp
Why clutch why seek why forage why meet
She is theatre unlimited
a drama immense
at will she thrills
a show all her own
complete unto herself
The Goddess
All encompassing
all enveloping
a mass of light in darkness
a sea of water in a desert
she’s earth and sky and sun and snow
a canopy in the wind
covering the universe
She’s Goddess the immense
A finite lover to the gods
an infinite mother to the sons
boundless creator of daughters
forever in her orbit
over mountains and oceans
high and low
over air over land
arid and fertile
she flies and glides
explores and disperses
slumbers and awakens
ventures and visits
all mine all yours
with no finale
a tableau unlimited
She’s Goddess the infinite
a visit to the dark interior
is for another dark day
or a midnight vigil
another dense evening
a feckless afternoon
for today there has been
an ambush
by the buxom beauty
of a monsoon rain
with a dash of panache
from overhanging clouds
a splash of style
over eaves of leaves
the grace of a wave
in the belly of the sea
and the hint of mint
in the mustard fields
today
the restless rain has stilled
the inner courtyard
of a restive mind
The crowds saunter
through the park
their musings parked on their shoulders
like a pet.
He swaggers along
his wisdom
walking by his side
mostly mute
does not intrude.
She ambles by
misses a step
trips on thoughts
she could not see
in the dark.
You slide by
your desire slithering alongside
swift and snake-like.
I seek
through a summer and snow
to and fro
the love I think I dropped
somewhere
sometime
on a walk in the park.
