How sad that I'm only managing a few posts a month rather than the few a week I aspired to when I began blogging. Time does slip away...
Anyway, this fantastic ghazal was featured on
Poetry Daily and I thought I'd share it, since I've been working with formal verse quite a bit:
By Accident
First she gave me the wound by accident.
Then the tourniquet she tied unwound by accident.
Your friend may want to start running.
I gave his scent to the hounds by accident.
Balloons on the mailbox, ambulance in the driveway.
Bobbing for apples I drowned by accident.
Did someone tell the devil we were building Eden?
Or did he slither on the grounds by accident?
I said some crazy things, but I swear, officer,
I burned her place down by accident.
Only surfaces interest me.
What depths I sound I sound by accident.
"What should we look for in a ghazal, Amit?"
Inevitabilities found by accident.
--Amit Majmudar
While I was copying this poem, I realized that the poet's name sounded familiar. More than a year ago, I saved another poem that a friend sent to me because it was sharp and had such lush imagery. As it turns out, it's by the same poet. Here it is:
Riches
My mother when she feared that we might starve
would give us candy taking up her violin
and playing each of us a bar
My mother when we danced the winter from
our boots and kicked the walls of circumstance
would write the needed letters over newsprint
and crinkle crackling fire till our hands
came back to us attracted to her gift
My mother painted us a still life and we peeled
and ate the fruit for lunch my mother sculpted
my sister earrings out of pebbles sculpted me
out of abandonment and earth my mother said
you are not poor until you’re at a loss
for worlds you are not rich until like Alexander
you’ve conquered foreign languages
somewhere a rich man pokes his fireplace
reminding it to give him heat she said
somewhere a rich man’s hand lunges in search
of sweetness down his horn of plenty
but there is not a fruit his fingers recognize
--Amit Majmudar
It is quite a gift to be able to write with humor on one hand and devout seriousness on the other. I'm now on the look out for more poems by the brilliant Dr. Majmudar. Here's all I could dig up on him:
Amit Majmudar is a resident physician in diagnostic radiology living in Cleveland, Ohio. Check out his website for a bit more info.:
http://web.mac.com/majmudar/iWeb/Site/Poetry.html
