This is such a defining moment for me, a beginning of a new journey, to be able to connect with poetry-lovers like myself! This blog is supposed to be mostly about poetry, but everything else I am passionate about, is connected with poetry, although I didn’t know that two years ago!!!
Does that sound very odd? My life turned a corner two years before, and I realized, my first and foremost passion is writing, and writing poetry. As a child, and as a teenager, I was an introvert, and basically a bookworm. The only thing I wished for, were books, and I used to devour them as quickly as I could. Along with reading a lot, I loved writing - but at that time, it was mainly prose! My love for writing started with writing journals, and writing letters. Yes, letters! Even before I reached my teens, I had pen friends in countries far away, and in those days technology did not make our life as comfortable as we have right now. I guess, my letters were quite poetic and charming, because my friends preserved my letters even after I stopped writing to them (unfortunately postages were expensive)!
Then came the life when life was not poetic any more! I forgot reading love-stories, I forgot pouring my emotions in journals or diaries. Many many years passed! I travelled and lived in a few countries, and absorbed the cultures of those exotic places. Was poetry always there in my passive imagination? Probably it was! Because one day two years earlier, one of my childhood friends who I almost lost, wrote to me , “ hi there! How many books have you published?”
That communication woke me up, it ignited the spark I needed! The memories from my childhood came back, I remembered who I was, and not exactly sure how, in an emotional moment I wrote my first poem! That poem was actually pretty good, may be one of the best of what I have written so far! After that first poem, I realized what my real passion is! And poems started coming one after another, every day! Sometimes I got up at midnight, and thought about some lines! And then I thought - I have to write this right now, otherwise these lines will slip away!
Now, everything I do (I have quite a few interests) - music, recitation, art which involves painting, copper-tooling, Faberge-inspired eggshell decorations, and a lot more - is connected with the world of poetry. I would love to share my experiences - early years of my life in India, later in Qatar, and my present experiences in Canada. I am back to my bookworm personality - during this world-wide pandemic, I read “The Plague” by Albert Camus. It is such an eye-opening classic - can’t imagine how the residents of a small town of Algeria handled a terrible epidemic seventy-five years ago, during which the gates of the city were closed to the outside world, and half of the population of that city suffered from that horrific disease and disappeared from the face of the earth.
A few other tragic incidents in this recent period of crisis inspired me to write a few more poems, although I felt, those incidents are real, they are about the indescribable sufferings of real people - would writing a poem lessen any misery?
I am extremely delighted that on this page I am able to connect with friends who look at the world the same way as I do.