Mona Dash

BIO

Mona Dash is an Indian writer settled in London. With an education in Telecoms Engineering and Management from Odisha, she works as a sales manager in a leading global technology organisation. She writes fiction and poetry and her work has been anthologised widely and published in international journals. She has a Masters in Creative Writing (with distinction) from the London Metropolitan University. She has two collections of poetry ‘Dawn- Drops’ (Writer’s Workshop, 2001) ‘A certain way’ (Skylark Publications, UK 2016). ‘Untamed Heart’ (Tara India Research Press, 2016) is her first novel. Mona has also participated in readings in venues such as Lauderdale House, Nehru Centre, the House of Lords, The Library, Leicester Writes festival, Yurt Café, London. Her short stories have been shortlisted and longlisted in various competitions such as The Asian Writer, Fish Short story, Strand International, Words and Women, UK, to name some.

 

 

 

 

.

Language

You are amused
when you hear words mispronounced
Preeface, instead of preface.

You are surprised
when you hear words unknown
and wonder how my alien tongue speaks
the language you made, nurtured.
What the rulers spoke
the brown sahibs learnt
the passport to jobs, money, life.

Don’t you remember, when you came
and stayed three hundred years?
When you taught us to speak like you do?
When we spoke, the words were different
tempered by mustard, coloured with turmeric.
The language the same, the sound a foreigner.

You expect me to sound the same as you.
You are surprised I speak your language.

Many hundred years before
you had arrived in the land
cooked by the sun, garnished with spice,
decorated with jewels
arrived and stayed, moving on bit by bit
conquering our minds, hearts, soil.

We made our changes, we learnt our lessons,
our tongues remained the same
foreign words our own.

.

We write in vain

Words appear on paper
at ease, as if they haven’t been deliberated,
thought of, reasoned.
As if they haven’t been found deep
within the memories of blood
the pain of the bones
the shadow of skin.
As if they haven’t been
drawn from the past,
the one imagined
the one spent.
Words live on paper,
as if it has been easy
to find them
as if forwarded on WhatsApp
as if they haven’t been chased
to the moon on horseback
on glittery mountain roads
or slipped through fingers
silvery fish in a net,
pined, lusted, worked for.

Words live verdant
on the tongue
ready to walk away.
On the edges of the fingers
waiting to coil and jump
on immortal paper.

Know this:
none of the above needs to happen.
A poem – for what is it
but words fancifully
decorating paper?
A story – what is it
but imagined lies?

Know this:
poetry, stories
are just easy craft
of the fanciful.

.

What is lost

Children, often little girls, go missing
voiceless in a labyrinth.
Planes go missing
in unchartered trajectories.
Memories go missing
in vacant souls.

The words nestling in my heart
released in my breath go
missing.
I hold up my hands
in the air, to find the very air is
missing.

.

Ruins

I see a building
stroked by neglect, kissed by moss
for years.
I see families
bags of the past abandoned
departing for shores further.
I see iron ripping
through the concrete, the walls
criss-crossing cracks.

Ruin
Inevitable ruin.
When the future arrives
the past has to leave.
It is the way.

They still see
silks on the floors, swords on the walls,
the glory of the past glistening
still
in the overgrown garden,
the broken down kitchen.
They talk of
shining spheres hanging from the rafters
where pigeons roost now
golden orbs bought from
foreign lands.

We leave,
pride in their eyes
holding on, holding on to
what is no more.
We leave,
pictures of ruins in my lenses
crumbling, fading sepia.

*****

.