To be a poet is to experience this world in its melancholic aspect. One is embedded in it a bit too roughly. Yet there is no desire to know it in its entirety; completion often deludes me and the fact that poetry in its sublime moments promises such an achievement, renders me even more precarious within. It stands as the only witness, though, in the nights of fragile longings, and watches this world in its mortal ebbing, almost every night. I often pray to my thoughts then to come barefoot, make as little noise as possible, just enough for words to know whatever is going on. Our world is so wrapped up in its wickedness, in its relentless desire to crush what is beautiful and feminine, what is robust and just, that one would like to have the company of poetry to denounce it, resist it and practice sufficient intolerance to overturn it. Often through the reality of dark nights, I have called upon poetry and have travelled wide and narrow paths of dreams to pick up stones. There are just so many of these nights in my experience that I can say more or less safely that I know darkness as well as I know myself. And it is blue. Poetry knows both of us so inescapably that we do not resist her. We resist our oppressors though, every moment. Nothing is more precious than this existence and its plenitude. Being a poet is, in fact, being properly. There is no burden of redeeming oneself here, just to “be” as words have their being in sentences. This universe then as “trillions of such sentences” is a place of pleasurable wondering, however baffling in its complexity. I have often wondered what Borges might have thought of this world if he had sight…
I write poetry to create more sentences…to fathom light as much as darkness; to sleep with night and impregnate myself with her dreams which few know, but that is how poetry is born. I beget what I love. I write to fill this world with beautiful and sensible nouns and pronouns: verbs, adjectives …hidden lights of Borges’ eyes and create syntaxes that function as reality, slightly elevated. My poetry is the most reliable shred of my torn up overcoat. I least fear writing, I suffer being silent.

(c) Divya Singh, College of Arts, New Delhi

---

---