Poems by Savita Singh
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Slice
Everything was simple Almost perfect that evening— Grandfather in his room Catching up with the morning news Reading the soon-to-be-folded Searchlight Father back from work Brother out to play cricket Sister finishing her homework The neighbours civil and orderly Flowers blooming just enough in the garden Our parrot unflustered in the brass cage hanging in the corner Mangoes neatly arranged one upon the other on the table The radio playing Bade Ghulam Ali Khan Tears rolling down Mother’s cheeks Her chest heaving now and then All this a tranquil picture And I a witness Of all its bleak serenity Our Precious Chatter We talked about the city And its birds About Meera and her eccentric friend The summer we spent sleeping on Krishna’s terrace The faces of dubious dreamers we sketched Who slit their throats for love About Shakuntala’s loveless life And the cruelty of time We gathered it’s difficult to be One with anything And to have something enduring As a companion We knew— Each moment of this gossip Could leave us thinking About gossip itself After all that though We left to catch the train Knowing we now knew The world a bit better |
Savita Singh is a distinguished feminist poet and political theorist. She writes in Hindi and English. She has four collections of poems in Hindi, two in French and two in Odia translation. Among her recent publications in poetry, an edited volume of women’s resistance poetry (2023) is notable. She has received many awards for her poetry, including the Hindi Academy Award, Raza Foundation Award, Mahadevi Verma Samman, Kedar Samman and Eunice De Souza Award. She is founding director of and professor at the School of Gender and Development Studies, IGNOU, Delhi.
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