A Tribute to My All-time-favorites

I promised to write about my hiatus from blogging in the previous post... but hey promises are made to be broken anyway, aren't they? ;-) 
Actually its taking a little too long to write & I've spent a lot of time reading, watching TED videos, sketching & composing poetry over my last week at home instead. So thought of sharing one such composition...

Of Legends

I read Kipling, Pinter, Yeats, Tagore,

Cummings, Eliot, Frost and many more.

Enraptured and stolen away by their imagery

How each poem, each phrase, every allegory,

So neatly woven, it simply conveys

Life's most intricate and labyrinthine byways

What does it take to pen such epics?

What sparks an imagination so profound

That speaks to devotees and agnostics

Alike, impoverished as well as the crowned?

Must I fall head over heals in love,

Or measure what I owe to the One above?

Must I experience bewildering vicissitudes of time,

Or elope with the evening moon like partners in crime?

Must I decipher the abstracted language of thy heart,

Or stitch together pieces of life long drifted apart?

Must I open my eyes to our unwitting coincidences,

Or ears to the melody of solitude and despondences?

Must I awaken from the curse of a hazy narcosis

Only to animate memories I pretend to dismiss?

Must I shaken the convictions of an extremist,

Must I redefine humanity to those of us who exist,

Or values and traditions for which we've stopped caring,

Or the occult meaning of secret ironies we're sharing?

What must I do -

To create a poetry comparable to these legends?

Fact is, where their imagination begins, mine simply ends.

The poetess in me is a personification of a literary limit,

Naive, distracted, insipid and befuddled she is, I admit

Typing and backspacing, the futile hours she spends

Only to notice more room for evolution and amends

My humble experiments cannot fathom to ape these gems.

BUT even an obsession of where their genius stems

Is oh so insightful, so remarkable, so compelling,

So rejuvenating, so miraculous, so astounding,

That even a poetry about their poetry

Satisfies my hankering to some degree,

Allowing me to pursue something

As beautiful, something as resounding!

Here are some tentative titles of poems that await completion, if there is such a thing :P (settlement rather ;-)) I hope to complete at least one or two & blog before winter break ends. Time will tell!

• Good Conversationalists
• Beautiful "Imperfections" and "Ordinary" Things
• Patience is Virtue
• Secret Admirers
• The Day I Run Out of Ideas

It is very obvious that I have no sense of meter or any technical skill whatsoever when it comes to composing poetry... so suggestions, comments, critique... any form of feeback most welcome! Also feel free to compose something in response & share :-) 

Think Global!

December 24th has always evoked lots of emotions in its wake. For myself, they have ranged from indifference as an infant, pure joy as a child, a sense of doubts and uncertainties as a teenager and gratitude, curiosity, hope and ambitiousness as a young adult. But I wonder what this day, the one I cherish so dearly and spend introspecting so deeply, has brought in the lives of others.

It has only taken me two decades to realize what a minuscule part of the universe I am. And this is my effort to retrospectively become cognizant of what was happening around me each year I spent this day selfishly celebrating a personal milestone.

Dec 24, 1990: 1,500 people rallied in Moscow to denounce moves that they fear could bring dictatorship to the Kremlin.

Dec 24, 1991: A bomb exploded in Hungary as a busload of 28 Soviet Jews passed by on their way to the Budapest airport for a plane to Israel.

Dec 24, 1992: A solar eclipse occured

Dec 24, 1993: Author of "The Power of Positive Thinking", Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, died

Dec 24, 1994: Four Islamic extremists hijacked Air France Flight 8969 in Algiers

Dec 24, 1995: Bethlehem celebrated first Christmas in 28 years free from Israeli occupation

Dec 24, 1996: Rwandan authorities arrested at least 500 Hutu refugees accused of genocide among the 340,000 who had returned from Tanzania that month.

Dec 24, 1997: 1st time a Channukah candle was officially lit in Vatican City

Dec 24, 1998: Former NATO chief Willy Claes and two other prominent Belgian politicians were found guilty of corruption by the country's highest court.

Dec 24, 1999: Maurice Couve de Murville, Prime minister of France, died

Dec 24, 2000: Ethan Bortnick, child musician was born.

Dec 24, 2001: Star Trek star Patrick Stewart returned to Broadway with his one-man performance of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol.

Dec 24, 2002: A bomb planted by a Muslim separatist organisation killed 13 people, including a town mayor, and wounded 12 in the southern Philippines town of Datu Piang.

Dec 24, 2003: Bolivian President Carlos Mesa declared a state of emergency because of flooding in central Bolivia, which killed at least 19 people and collapsed a bridge crucial to Bolivian exports.

Dec 24, 2004: The world's strongest earthquake in three years rocked a remote stretch of ocean floor between Australia and Antarctica, shaking buildings hundreds of miles away in Australia's southern island state of Tasmania.

Dec 24, 2005: E=mc² a formula part of the theory of special relativity that Einstein published in 1905 passes the best tests of accuracy scientists have yet devised, according to a report in the journal Nature.

Dec 24, 2006: Queen Elizabeth delivered a holiday address to her soldiers in Iraq & Afghanistan.

Dec 24, 2007: Hindu nationalists in India won a resounding victory in a Gujarat state election. (Narendra Modi re-elected as well)

Dec 24, 2008: A Canadian woman who went missing during a blizzard has been found alive, buried in 23 inches of snow four days after her sport utility vehicle got stuck in a snowy field.

Dec 24, 2009: The US Senate passed the final version of the health care reform bill.

It will always continue to amaze me what this day means in the lives of other people, families & nations worldwide.

ps- Next post is in the works... I will attempt to explain my long departure from blogging and internal conflicts in it.