Poems by Joie Bose

Joie Bose is a corporate professional in the ITES industry, a former professor of Jadavpur University. She is the India Community Leader of The WIT Network. She has won Bharat Nirman Award for Literature, Nissim International Prize for Poetry, Women par Excellence Award for Literature amongst others. She has authored Corazon Roto and Sixty Nine Other Treasons (2015) and Amour (2020). She is the General Secretary of Poetry Paradigm and Mrs. India (East) 2018.

Rainbows

It was a soap bubble and I was in it

and all the lovely people around

had rainbow halos around their faces;

People were laughing, as they always do

All people are all born to laugh

and I was born, to be in a soap bubble to 

gaze at the people laughing-

perhaps one day too, I will laugh... 

"Who will burst the bubble?"

they all chanted like a mantra

and they all reached out their palms

Their fore fingers outstretched as if they were all aiming

for a gold medal and if they could touch it

they could too become all gold, twenty four carats;

but I in my bubble all foaming from the mouth of ecstasy,

a champagne bottle opened on a twentieth anniversary 

was soaring higher and higher 

for all the people had rainbows around their faces

and how I love the seven colours... 

Your love and mine is but a soap bubble, my love 

as all human loves happen to get burst one day

and I don't fear it anymore as I don't fear those 

outstretched hands that don't want me to see the rainbows;

But I fear you won't close my eyes... 

When bubbles burst, rainbows go away-

the seven coloured circles that protect you from thorns

make you forget your desert 

as you get drenched in the water of an oasis. 

I have seen children stare at them who sell bubbles

at traffic signals, street corners and outside school gates;

and in their gaze I found me, staring at you from afar... 

23.6.2017

the water stands calm with ripples—

a poem will not make it still,

it still remains witness to the night.

your son now on your chest

my son on mine and her son on hers -

how we don't have daughters.

our bosoms hold more than sons

and poems

one day the water will come out

to intoxicate the world

with none to hear the witnesses. 

this were a part of another story

but one day I will write ours. 

Nothing

I always have

Nothing to tell you,

I am nothing to you

And you,

Are nothing to me

And we have nothing

Between us,

And I have nothing

Left in me to give,

And I accept nothing

From you.

In our nothingness, realizations dawn

Perfection, perhaps is nothing.

24.6.2016

The Pit

Can you equate 

your love 

with your lover,

perhaps put a formula of 

arithmetic, geometry or algebra 

- this is why I fear love

and fall into the pit-

it often tends to become

mathematics.

14.6.2017