#220: Tender Love Poems + 8 years of The Alipore Post (almost) 🌿 ❤️

My dear reader,

As I write this from Alipore HQ, I’m in disbelief that on 2nd February, I’ll be completing 8 years with this creativity baby / labor of love / passion project of mine that feels like home. And based on all the lovely emails and interactions I’ve had with so many of you over the years, I know that The Alipore Post has felt like a homecoming / refuge to lots of you.

So before I flower you with some gorgeous roses I met in Lucknow yesterday and some equally stunning love poems from here and there, I’d like to send each of you a big, big hug across the river that is the Internet. Thank you for being a part of this meandering journey. You’ve given me a place to be vulnerable, to shed old selves and allow myself to bloom into the person I’m still becoming. Much, much gratitude for small kindnesses. 🌿

Here are the roses I promised:

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Poetry Corner

I didn’t want to wait till all the Valentine’s Day fuss kicks in to share these lovely love poems I’ve been hoarding for a while:

Art by my fave Anne Magill

1. For The Moment by Pierre Reverdy
Translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Life is simple and gay
The bright sun rings with a quiet sound
The sound of the bells has quieted down
This morning the light hits it all
The footlights of my head are lit again
And the room I live in is finally bright

Just one beam is enough
Just one burst of laughter
My joy that shakes the house
Restrains those wanting to die
By the notes of its song

I sing off-key
Ah it’s funny
My mouth open to every breeze
Spews mad notes everywhere
That emerge I don’t know how
To fly toward other ears

Listen I’m not crazy
I laugh at the bottom of the stairs
Before the wide-open door
In the sunlight scattered
On the wall among green vines
And my arms are held out toward you

It’s today I love you

2. It’s Time to Find a Place by Eunice de Souza

It’s time to find a place
to be silent with each other.
I have prattled endlessly
in staff-rooms, corridors, restaurants.
When you’re not around
I carry on conversations in my head.
Even this poem
has forty-eight words too many.

3. Between Us by Nizar Qabbani

I knew when I said
I love you
that I was inventing a new alphabet
for a city where no one could read
that I was saying my poems
in an empty theater
and pouring my wine
for those who could not
taste it.

4. A Decade by Amy Lowell

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.

5. Naming the Heartbeats by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

I’ve become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie,Honeybunch,
Snugglebear—and that’s just for my children.
What I call my husband is unprintable. You’re welcome. I am
his sweetheart, and finally, finally—I answer to his call and his
alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little
Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you
get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out
into the evening’s first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras,
a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation
of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl
and sleep, when shadows of moons we don’t yet know brush across
our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when
we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying
to remember a path or a river we’ve only visited in our dreams?

6. Aubade by Yanyi

   I woke up with so much love for you
It doesn’t matter where I am 

I am making eggs

   The sun is warming my just-shaved head
   like your hand when sometimes
                                    it rests there.

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The Osheen Siva Interview (Seen Magazine)

I had the most amazing time visiting Osheen Siva’s Goa home-studio last year, and interviewing her about the brave new world of decolonized dreamscapes
and narratives of queer power she brings out in her work.

An excerpt from our conversation:

“…in a Trojan horse kind of way, I project these bigger ideas of gender and sexuality into the work. I want it to have meaning even if people don’t get it. Visuals aren’t just about aesthetics; it has to stand for something! As an artist, I hope my work offers a different lens to see the world, to evoke a sense of wonder.”
-Osheen Siva

I’m so proud of the piece being a part of Seen’s issue on Dreams. Read it here.

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Links that made me smile

• Daily Dose of Internet (Much fun)

• The creative legacy of Gifs: Past, present and future

• Scream into the void

• In praise of boredom (Oh Meera! ❤️)

• Instead of Dying

• Want: The Flowering Conversation Deck 🌼

• Brown Noise x ADHD

• Four Thousand Weeks (A tribute to the book by Oliver Burkeman, an exploration of time management in the face of human finitude, and addressing the anxiety of “getting everything done.”)

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Parting words

I’m staying with this thought this week that I read in the newsletter Human Stuff from Lisa Olivera:

“I was long desperate to be “well”. Now, all I want is to be real — to be whole — to be fully alive, which includes days and seasons of not being as well. It includes moments of not being my “Best Self”. It includes acting out of integrity sometimes. It includes swirls of unknown sweeping me into fear. It includes getting sick, and losing my way, and saying the wrong thing. It includes having days where I forget to drink water. It includes tragedy and grief. It includes self-judgment and all the things we’re told don’t exist when we are “well.” It includes getting confused between what I think and what I think I’m supposed to think. It includes all of it. And I will spend my life practicing the art of remembering all of it isn’t a problem — it’s being alive. It’s a gift.”
-The pressure to be well / Lisa Olivera

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That’s all for now, dear reader. My mother just gave me the warmest bedtime hug. Passing on some of the tenderness to you.

Love, Rohini