BIO
Honoured with Member Of The Most Excellent Order Of The British Empire (MBE) for Literature, in the Queen’s New Year Honours list 2020, Yogesh Patel is a writer, poet and editor of Skylark. He runs Skylark Publications UK as well as a non-profit Word Masala project to promote SA diaspora literature. A founder of the literary charity, Gujarati Literary Academy, he has been honoured with the Freedom of the City of London. With LP records, films, radio, children’s book, fiction and non-fiction books, and three poetry collections to his credit, in 2017, he was presented to The Queen at Buckingham Palace. A recipient of many awards, including an honour in April 2019 at the New York University as a Poet-of-Honor, he has read in the House of Lords and at the National Poetry Library. His recent collection of poems is Swimming with Whales. His writing has appeared in PN Review, The London Magazine, Shearsman, IOTA, Envoi, Understanding, Orbis, on BBC TV and Radio, and more. He is also anthologised in MacMillan, Redbeck and other anthologies. By profession, Yogesh is a qualified optometrist and an accountant. Author’s Websites: patelyogesh.co.uk and skylarkpublications.co.uk
A painting by Jo Piper
MS
(Dedicated to Jo and Jeremy Piper)
If you’re showing me a broken world
It’s a chaos harnessed
A kaleidoscope of the rainbow-shards
Behind the drifting autumn leaves
Yet it is not a torn picture
I stroke your hands gently
This is you who once wandered off in a meaning
The mirror may have broken
Each piece has your face
You ask: Can you rearrange fragments as love?
You fill the emptiness of the sky and the sea
With the blues fetched from your loss
I stare at the jagged seas and skies
I walk sideways I study from an angle
Bloody things are broken
You reassure me:
These are opposite worlds of abundance
You gently pull back your hand
Nothing is broken and yet everything is
Not everything dropped breaks
I like that
The painting that you painted was restoring itself!
You continue
Then let me make those masks I drew speak
Let me fit cubes and triangles precisely
A cobweb of frozen time was thawing
I am the missing piece of this rendition
A light is finally reaching the flame
So, hold my shaky hands with a brush
The time had come for a painting just to hang
Never bother us again
A Lost Language
Not a word penned
The feathers walked away
What was to be said dried up
In a lone inkpot
I have watched the wings flap without birds
Had I caught the feather, then?
The hopeless blank papers
Took to skies without wings
For they too could laugh at the sky
The business of bodies and meanings
was always complex
‘t wasn’t about flying
‘t wasn’t about escaping
‘t wasn’t about proving anything
renouncing the words
becoming a nothingness
‘t was about releasing
the skeleton to dust
The birds didn’t have to sing
The feathers weren’t meant to write
wings don’t matter either
words can be always silenced
a feather is just a tool
You forgot
I have written myself
without writing anything.
Only if you can read!
*****
A pleasure to read your poems. Thanks.