Contemporary Literary Review India | Print ISSN 2250-3366 | Online ISSN 2394-6075 | Vol. 7, No. 2: CLRI May 2020

Akhila Pingali

Akhila is pursuing Ph D in English Literature at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Some of my poems have appeared on an online platform called Terribly Tiny Tales, and one of them has found a place in their anthology entitled 99 poems.

Show Me Art

I – The Painting

So I was walking back home one night

With a wrapped painting in my arms

One I'd just bought at an auction

And I bumped into a man

The parcel fell and came undone

The painting caught his eye

He stopped and looked at the colours

And the strange way they mixed

Down to a twinkle in the woman's eye

That seemed to shine in the darkness

The man stood there, gazing

Lost in thought

And then finally he nodded

And turned back

I asked him if he wasn't going

Where he was headed five minutes earlier

He shook his head and simply said

He was a killer on a mission

But the woman he was after

Looked like the one in the painting

And perhaps her eyes twinkled like that, too.

II – The Song

A song floated out of a window

It drifted into a bird and out of its throat

And wafted down with the wind

It hummed among the wasps and bees

And whirled through the leaves

It glided up the tinkling stream

And pranced among the twilight fields

Hovered above the city lights

And poured into the drunk man's ear

And he forgot to beat his wife

And fell asleep.

III – The Poem**

Drop a word into the ocean

And watch the ripples spread

To the trembling sand and

Through shaken bodies,

And rise

Like steam

Till the air shimmers

Till the whole sky shudders in ecstasy

As it soars, expands into a poem

That drops back into the ocean

And washes ashore

Bringing with it the whole world

And laying it at your wet feet.

Newspaper for Breakfast

On a lazy Sunday morning I don’t want to make breakfast

At the tiffin place under the bridge they give me my idly

I bring it home. It is wrapped in old news about climate change and the like,

On one side there is half an article about someone who ate beef

And is now dead – could be food-poisoning, they’re saying.

Sunday morning newspaper in front I sip my tea

And sit with the crossword. That is the way to make words stay:

Meanings don’t change in the little boxes and they’ll still be useful tomorrow,

Even when it’s someone else’s turn to die of writing or eating or praying.

Meanwhile oil is oozing into the meaningless ones,

Either that, or they suffocate under neatly folded clothes

Behind neatly closed doors, or warm up a bunch of peanuts –

So cheap, so cheap, at the cost of lives.

Contemporary Literary Review India: Contemporary Literary Review India (CLRI) is a literary journal in English and publishes a wide variety of creative pieces including poems, stories, research papers (literary criticism), book reviews, film reviews, essays, arts, and photography of the best quality of the time. CLRI is an internationally referred journal and publishes authors from around the world. https://literaryjournal.in

Contemporary Literary Review India: Contemporary Literary Review India (CLRI) is a literary journal in English and publishes a wide variety of creative pieces including poems, stories, research papers (literary criticism), book reviews, film reviews, essays, arts, and photography of the best quality of the time. CLRI is an internationally referred journal and publishes authors from around the world. [https://literaryjournal.in

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