You – my bastard child, you have learnt to speak, after years

I have created –

a country for you where your fractured self

lives by multiple names

With not enough tomorrows to go round, and all yesterdays in short supply

Night closes in with its breath taking grip/ Night that walks in the guise of day.

The Kathmandu sky sliced with unlive wires. Highways broken like bread or a body.

A few years ago, my husband and I shared a flat in London with my brother and sister. On some kind of quest for self-improvement, we decided that we should all read more poetry.

In our continuing celebration of poetry this week, we bring to you two gems from the very first print volume of La.Lit, by highly regarded Nepali poets Manu Manjil and Momila.

Many Nepalis put great stock in bravery, seeing no irony in praising the bloodlust of Gurkhas in the same breath as they claim for themselves the apostle of non-violence, Gautam Buddha.

All Nepalis are poets at heart. How could they not be, living in this terrible contusion of the sublime and the second-rate? So every day is poetry day in Nepal, even if someone, somewhere, deemed 21 March to be World Poetry Day and we feel bad we missed it. We’ll make up for it. To […]