The poet urges her readers to break free from their mundane 9-to-5 lives and search for the numinous.
Eshita Bhat’s poems are about the desire to escape from the mundane 9-to-5 life. She writes about living in an emptiness ‘Until the last/ Of this ash-ing white/ Numbness prevails/This fleeting night’. She urges her readers to break free and go hunting for adventures. To look for beauty, here on earth. Something like a picturesque landscape on an autumn day, leaves an everlasting imprint on its viewer, that she describes in her poem ‘Van Gogh Sky’.
INBOX
Blue, pink and purple hues
Piano solos and rhythm and blues
Empty minds and inundating souls
For two hands, a million roles.
You could go home and write those emails,
Or you could run so far away,
A place distant from the nine through five,
Won't you at last sway?
Among this unfamiliar swarm
Everyone seems so warm
Your clandestine becoming
Or a heretical succumbing
The lights here flash
Only to slow down time
When the mind runs free as photons do
Overtakes a placidness sublime
Humble submission to the power
And fears are washed away;
Oblivious of that overfilled inbox,
You must, for once, sway!
NAMELESS BLOOD
One bit by the next
The sheet burns
So with it burns
The agony around.
As smoke dissipates
Into the evening air
Some emptiness abounds.
An enveloping fear
Preys on the free
Murdering smiles
In some angry spree.
In nameless blood
Thousands die
Headlines, headlights
Teary eyes.
An effective quietus
Are drags three or four
In a quaint corner
On the balcony floor.
With the moving clouds
And the setting sun
Bluing skies
Rather fun.
Until the last
Of this ash-ing white
Numbness prevails
This fleeting night.
VAN GOGH SKY
There is a piece of land
Far away from this decrepitude
Where the sky compels you
To look for van Gogh's initials
Undersigned.
Leaves here this day,
Turn an allaying shade of yellow
In the August sun.
The yellow doesn't upset;
Not once are you reminded of
The metaphorical decay and putrefaction.
All that abounds is
An unfamiliar joy fluttering inside you
Here come the butterflies.
Time here has no meaning;
But time is of the essence
It pauses and plays together
Removing you from who you even are
It's what makes these fleeting seconds
So serene, so divine
That the decadent accounts of heaven
May well fall short and
Confine themselves to rhymes
In children's books.
All you hear is a distant feign chatter
Glad it hardly matters.
With the wind blowing steadily,
Whiff the scents of the earth
The magical notes you didn't know
Now awaken inside of you
As you walk under this bountiful umbrella
Towards a destination
You wish dispels into thin air
So you may walk
Behind shadows
Turning obscure corners
Or pause to hear crickets
Stridulating at best
You could be fidgeting all along
Yet there is one big relief
That the van Gogh plot of sky
Is yours if you believe.
(Eshita Bhat is an aspiring poet from New Delhi, India. A graduate from Shri Ram College of Commerce, she was the Chief Editor for the institution's annual magazine, Yamuna. She upholds the tenet that putting rhythm to words can offer a sense of order to an otherwise chaotic life.)