VANDANA KUMAR - POEMS

Vandana Kumar is a bon vivant who loves travelling, working with young minds and exploring creative possibilities beyond the ordinary. She has done her masters in History from ‘Lady Shri Ram College’ – ‘University of Delhi’ and her Diplôme from the ‘Alliance Française de Delhi’.
She is a middle school teacher and also translates for various publishing houses and corporates. An active member of various quiz clubs across Delhi. She has a soft corner for Calcutta where she spent her childhood. Her various passions include singing, playing the piano, composing music and participating in local music competitions. She describes herself as a dreamer…a wanderer and a certified incurable romantic…the romantic moorings worsened with all her fancy French studies. She contributes poems regularly to online magazines and has been published in a couple of anthologies. Poetry for her is her stress buster – her flight of fancy – and strangely – what keeps her rooted too.

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Ephemeral Winds
​

​In life’s see-saw
The sages you saw
In hues, not just one or two
And your hedonistic ways
Clearly got a thumbs down
Virtuous living after all
Eases suffering
In life of beyond
 
All your life you wanted to live
Through clichés galore
Who has seen tomorrow?
Life is here
In the now
 
And you rush to take a train
Wondering if it is to late
To walk barefoot on grass
Without fear of ants
All your life
You looked down at their ilk
Such disdain
They were so diminutive,
After all
 
 
You stretch out your palms
Encircle a flame
Hoping it would not dim
Or mistake you for moth
 
You begin your life
Some day in youth
Opening windows for summer breezes
And in sagging age
Closing doors
To cold draught
 
                   

No Afterlife But This!
​

​Some years from now
When those around us 
Perceive us as old
You infirm
Me terribly weak
 
We shall lie together
And hear them well
Perhaps in snatches
Of conversations
They do not know we overheard
 
Living room debates
Which child will sacrifice his sleep?
And a party in turns
To monitor
That medicine
Measure that injection dose
 
Let us suffer together
The indignity it might bring
As our ailments progress
And rank strangers know
Which ointment replaced which pill
 
So what if our memories elude
There will be days of deluge
 How we once sat at the kerb
With an energy of youth
 And between my Kafka
And your Marquez
 Said it all
Without saying it at all
 
So what if one refrain we skip
Of that Beatles number
 Once played on loop
A line here  
An out of breath rendition there
Will more than suffice
 
And friends’ names might slip
And things so dear to us once
Now even less than partial recall
 
Let us not pledge forever
In an afterlife
One you do not believe me
One that I have not see
 
Let us just promise to be  
You with your partial dentures
Me with my shaky grip on my cane
Cushioning each other
From the ignominies of our age
 

Pushing Doors
​

​Some balmy summer sublime
Indiscretions in your prime
‘Stairway to heaven’ you sought
That one joint shared
That seedy bar
Those pearly gates that opened
Heaving valley  
Whiff of that spread  
Garters et al
 
Conversations with old friends
You could tell it was getting inane
Forced chats that you fled
When you sensed their death
And doors that opened by chance
To rare conversations so intense
Lingering hangovers
Of the metaphors you used
 
Some entrances tantalized
A sneak preview you cried
Some deemed haunted since birth
But never ever spooked you out
Doors whose bells you tiptoed to ring
An inch in height gained
Or so you thought, such ‘make believe’ back then
 
 
 
 
Doors like our dreams
Reoccurring forever
Revolving in theme
 
Life has never been about the houses we lived in
Or those in which we did not
But about doors
Those that opened for us
And those –
Whose thresholds we never could cross