For Olafur and Nils
By Goirick Brahmachari
The poems are written for the instrumental pieces below by Olafur Arnalds (an Icelandic musician) and Nils Frahm (a German musician).
This is a first thought best thought experiment.
There are eight instrumental pieces in the video and a poem for each one of them.
1
A broken window in rain.
No one walking down the streets.
Not a single sound,
Except for the drops
Of rain on the hay roof.
My chest pains
And I cannot stay
Insane for long,
For love and hate remains
Much the same.
Memory
Mocks
Fails
Me
Stumbles
Falls
My
I
Death has found its way into our lives quietly.
2
Like a river, we shall carry
Our burdens onto the sea.
Flowers will whisper
And the mountains will echo the forest
That welcomes us with open arms.
Will we lose our vanity like the waterfalls?
Will we let ourselves
Melt into cold streams?
Hit by white rocks to lose our self a little?
Bruised and weary, yet flowing eternally
Like smoke, like breeze that breezes
Into our teenhood smiling photographs and injuries,
Long before, when we were young and dreaming of skies.
Will we?
3
A city opens its mouth to the night.
People return home, some stay back.
Some return in auto rickshaws.
Others in drunken buses.
Traffic lights.
Rain.
Dust.
Many Summers.
So many Winters.
Children under flyovers.
Halogens.
Weariness wears the evening.
4
And the creatures of the night
They sniff dendrite by the cold alleys
Ragpicking dreams in sacks of dead black
Crows and filth. They who live under the roads
Of passing cars and buses, get high by the night.
They who get raped by the policemen every single night
And forget themselves whenever they are asked to.
They who sell flowers to the lovers from the cemetery
And toys to the rich kids to shape their dreams.
They who also pose as mothers of injured sons sometimes.
5
Cars move like bokeh.
Time is just a memory.
Red skies in the dark.
Voices smirk.
Yellow insomnia.
No hunger to feed.
No thrill to stay awake.
No remorse.
I walk back to my home, alone.
I stifle memory.
Not a single soul to separate this night.
This forgetfulness.
6
Love can heal these concretes
And make a dead city your own
When the nights are all weary
And those jobs, they are all the same.
The skin and the concrete
Remains the same.
Only the cover wears off
In the city.
7
Rain falls on a river, blurs memory.
Ink stains on my shirts, blue mountain ice.
Mud on my legs, mud-houses melt in rain.
Stones prick my toes.
My naked feet,
Water,
Rocks,
Thorns.
8
Dream is like that road that passes by the forlorn town
Of lakes and white lights, hillocks of hope
And a river that carries death and time
A lonesome temple lights up on the highest hill
And then it’s gone
Closed shops that never open, Snoring houses
And a yellow breeze that tells us that we are not there yet
But we have reached.
…
Afterword
Out of scale, does not rhyme
Mornings, nights, lives.
Bio:
Goirick lives in Delhi. He hails from Silchar, Assam. His first collection of poems, For the Love of Pork, has recently been published from Les Editions du Zaporogue, Denmark. His chapbook of poems, joining the dots, is forthcoming from Nivasini Publishers, Hyderabad.
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