IRTIKA KAZI - POEMS

Irtika Kazi is a poet from Pune, India. Her poem A Call from the Alpines was published in YuGen literary magazine in July 2017. Some of her poems have been selected to be published in The Indian Literature Magazine of Sahitya Akademi. Her poems were published in The Metaworker, an online literary magazine for millennials in March 2018. Her poem A hope to bloom was featured in Duane Vorhees’s poetry blog.  The Odyssey was exhibited in the Museum of Goa for a poetry exhibit.  A Call from the Alpines and A hope to bloom were published in the Brown Girl magazine of Houston, Texas in September 2017.  Some of her poems were published on Spillwords Press. Further to that, her poem Sunrise was published in the anthology ‘Fragrance of Asia’, an Anthology by Asian poets, in January 2018. The tale of Sulasa’s courage – A mythological poem was published in the Contemporary Literary Review India journal in February 2018. Her work has been selected for publishing in The Literary Hatchet print magazine in April 2018. She has performed her poems in open mics and events like The Pune heritage festival 2018, Women Writer’s Fest by Shethepeople etc.
Link of the interview - http://www.thesuccessmagazine.co.in/2018/02/reading-is-essential-practice-interview-irtikakazi.html?showComment=1519797648077#c8202478105051341627
Instagram – irtika.kazi
Email – irtika.kazi@gmail.com

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Icarus and the Ugarit Eclipse

​

​Icarus was warned by Daedalus of
Complacency and incessant pride;
He was apprised of flying too high, towards the Sun
And plummeting into Water,


 
lest his wings melt and burn— wax, and a father's love.
But like me he wasn't faithful to the hands
That crafted his wings, the strings that held him above


heartache’s gargoyles.


 
Instead, I yearned for love that was darker than the Ugarit Eclipse,


Longer than two minutes and seven seconds of darkness.
 
 
Icarus, now in Baroque and Gothic artwork symbolizes hubris.


And every time I see you, I think of
Icarus who flew too close to the sun.

Four Tea cups
​

​Four tea cups lay unattended since Mittag
– On the black, bedraggled table in the canteen.
 
You and I – drinking each other in--
Slow, dainty sips. Each
 
tea cup is empty and ready to be refilled
But you don’t.
Instead, you play with it.
Your fingers hold them with dexterity – unforgiving,
Entangling,
Timorously masking the quarks and leptons of emotions camouflaged--
Within the empty tea cup.
 
You endeavor to drown me—your eyes--
carry Lake Guatavita and I,
a trifling wanderer questing El Dorado.
 
The afternoon passes by--
Ophelia, drowning
 
You don’t finish your tea. Still.
Until--
I drown, with each sip,
In Lake Guatavita.   

Escaping
​

​Riffling through the asemic writings of
Serafini, I am thrown back to my rudimentary state of –
Helplessness
Naked and new-fashioned, taken captive by--
Paraphernalia so vivifying, it led me to
Escape
the neonatal confinement with a jerk-and-drag,
with my head dangling at the edge of the
fluorescent glass surrounding.
 
How well this translated into a gory dream, I
saw four days back
in a prolonged state of Helplessness
 
good enough to be lodged in Codex Seraphinianus, chapter six.
 
 

War
​

Walking down the promenades of my girlhood,
A war-torn republic
I reconnoiter and examine
Ways to –
hammer nails back into scotched parapets,
walling my religiosity;
broken jaws, severed heads,
shamefaced cobwebs,
moth-eaten breads
 
                                             All that needs to be cleansed.
 
Someone needs to wash away
streets that once flattered my vanity,
    Now,
pocked with doubt
 
 Parklands that only felt the touch of falling petals,
    Now,
Refuse
to be touched.
 
The sinews of my nation, burning.