Goa's outstanding poets featured in the Anthology The Brave New World
Selma Carvalho
And always that red hill with the white cross atop it,
ringed by a low redstone wall
curved across the crest,
grass over it thickly, everywhere dry grass
a sluggish noon breeze parting it
to show the hand-hewn blocks,
Gavin Barrett in Baga, Salcette
You wake up and it is already late August. At ten-past-six the kingfisher leaves its perch with an ear-splitting call. It’s a silver morning chiming with the sounds of doves, orioles, prinias, coucals, drongos and a solitary orange thrush which sings with great enthusiasm. The webs of grass spiders glisten with dew.
Salil Chaturvedi in Ghosts of a Grove
the pilgrims of zatra
bisect the novena procession
celebration and supplication
in a herringbone of faith
the drifts of a fishing net
diamond-knit
seeking silver scales
haul in lost sailors
Mrinalini Harchandrai in Cross
Orange sweets may fail you
Melting glutinously in fat-necked bottles
Orange peel will not.
Dry, it will dispel the nausea of exile,
Wet, it will spurt rage into the eyes
Of a wet-lipped sailor
Attracted by the smell of a girl’s first bleeding.
Jerry Pinto in Exiled from Burma
There should have been a citadel of love. A civilization built by a river on the reaping profits of desire. Where the bottom-line, the ROI, the spring and harvest were just: tenderness.
Rochelle Potkar in Citadel
i. April, Briefly
April leans in like an unlatched door—
not quite May, but no longer
the half-hot half-cool riddle of March.
Tino de Sa in Three Months in Goa