Hi RIL,

I am posting nine new poems that I wrote over the course of the last few weeks to commemorate a coming of age of sorts with friends who have helped me improve my writing. I am including the “Foreword,” which was my tenth post to celebrate this coming of age in its slightly edited version. I hope you all will enjoy the poems.

Noor

When you glanced at my former poems, you, like most of the seasoned critics that I have encountered in my entire writing career, must have seen a very guarded poet. I weigh my words very carefully, and I like having that kind of command over my thoughts. I am generally afraid of letting loose an unnamed cat-like creature that often paces restlessly in my head. I like to keep it on a tight leash, disciplined, submissive, attentive. You will see that in my poetry. My inner poet (with magnificent tiger-like attributes) savors control.

As I progressed with the poems written particularly for this auspicious event, my poetry became very candid, and at times, even audacious. At certain points over the course of the last few weeks, it became more than poetry. It evolved into a dialogue among the many divided aspects of my personality. I was able to quiet down a lot of griefs, put an end to long-standing arguments, accept defeat for inner battles that had continued way past their prime. In short, I healed myself. Slowly but surely, with my own words, with my own thoughts, and with a definite direction in my poetry targeted to make a difference for me and for my readers, I was able to salve a lot of old hurts.
This journey was not altogether sad. It was not all about laying demons to rest. There were some exceptionally happy moments. When love matures, it often sort of fizzles out. It is good to realize that sometimes love retains its metaphorically clich??d pizzazz even after its expiration date is long past. You will see this in ???The Constant One.??? It is a poem quite out of character for me, and it happened unexpectedly. I do not write about two people that are terribly, hopelessly, insatiably in love with each other, and I don???t plan on doing so in the near future. In fact, I don???t really believe in that kind of love. For me, love comes packaged with a little hate in the wrappings. Hate surfaces sooner or later, and in the best case scenario, you can get over it and channel it only during fights and arguments. ???The Constant One??? happens to be a love poem, as best as I can write those (and I believe I don???t write them well), but it does come with its counterpart, the aforementioned hate. You will see a little bit of hate bubbling up in ???The Limits of Love.??? I think a healthy relationship should incorporate a good sized side order of hate with the love entr??e. Hopefully, most of you cynics out there will agree with me.

Most of the poems, however, were about my personal journey, my literal travels and losses in ???Me, The Cartographer??? and the importance of safe-guarding my mental well-being in ???Self-Preservation.??? ???Providence??? was about my flaws as a human being, about the shortcomings of others and about being able to accept them, digest them, survive them for the love of God and all that???s holy, because I do not and will not believe in a vengeful God. ???Medicine and Poetry,??? as the title very aptly lists them, is about my two great passions ??? I believe in the very core of my personality, I decided to write in order to heal myself, and I very consciously chose to go into medicine to heal others. These two go hand-in-hand for me. I cannot differentiate my love for one from the other. ???Bricks and Stones and Walls??? was like excising a recurring neuroma. I am sure there is residual grief in the lives of so many of us. This poem for me was one more surgery to get rid of my imagined equivalent of neuropathic pain at the site of an amputated limb. No doubt, a jumbled mass of nerves will once again grow and make me hypersensitive, but for now, this poem has given me a temporary reprieve, and for that I am grateful.

Moving on, I was truly inspired by modern literature in the summer of 2008. I was particularly moved by the way the modernists wrote about time. Time was in itself an entity, a character in modern literature, and I was completely engulfed, intrigued, downright besotted with the way time passage was used by the likes of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce and W.B. Yeats. And so, my last two poems were about how time has played a role in my life. You know, we often disregard what time does for us. It hurts us and heals us and it does this over and over again, and I simply wanted to acknowledge this in my work. So, ???Time??? and ???Year Number Twenty Four??? are both my acknowledgments. While ???Time??? employs a more somber brand of poetry, more typical for me, ???Year Number Twenty Four,??? written tonight, on the eve of my twenty fourth birthday, is a gift to myself, something that made me laugh while I wrote it and has made me laugh every time that I have reread it. It is good to laugh this way at yourself. It makes you appreciate the small things in life that frequently matter more than any major happenings. It is often the insignificant events over the course of a year that make it memorable, a new joke, a bad movie, a genuine belly-laugh, a friend???s advice, you get the idea.
I hope you will enjoy reading these poems as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Noor