Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih Poems

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih Biography

Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih was born and brought up in Sohra, Meghalaya. He writes poems, drama and fiction in Khasi and English. His latest works include the epic-length novel Funeral Nights (Westland) and Manik: A Play in Five Acts (Dhauli Books) . His collections of poetry in English include Moments (Writers Workshop) , The Sieve (Writers Workshop) , The Yearning of Seeds (HarperCollins) and Time's Barter: Haiku and Senryu (HarperCollins) . He is the author of Around the Hearth: Khasi Legends (Penguin) and the co-editor of Dancing Earth: An Anthology of Poetry from Northeast India (Penguin) . He has published poems and stories in Planet: The Welsh Internationalist, Wasafiri, The New Welsh Review, PEN International, The Literary Review, Karavan, The Sentinel Literary Quarterly, Cordite Poetry Review, Poetry International Web, Presence, Cattails, Asahi Haikuist, Wales Haiku Journal, World Haiku Review, Frogpond: The Journal of the Haiku Society of America, Down to Earth, The Indian Quarterly, The Hindu Business Line, Indian Literature, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from North-East India, Pilgrim's India, Day's End Stories and others. His awards include the first North-East Poetry Award (Tripura,2004) , the first Veer Shankar Shah-Raghunath Shah National Award for tribal literature (Madhya Pradesh,2008) , a Tagore Fellowship (IIAS, Shimla,2018) , The Bangalore Review June Jazz Award (2021) and the Sparrow Literary Award (2022) . He teaches literature at North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong.)

The Best Poem Of Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih

Light In The Night (For Amanda)

Do not ask me the whys and the wherefores;
poetry is anoetic; you might as well question the rooster
or the plums, why they put on spring blossoms.
But how and when poetry first came to me?
If you insist, let me flip through the folios of memory.

Poetry did not come beckoning me like the hills in my blood.
It did not come on the fragile wings of a ñiangkongwieng*
singing of autumn. It did not come from the sunny
streams, naked and splashing with childhood.
It did not come from the afternoon bonfires
and the sweet, burning faggot smoke sinking
to my bones and rising above woods warbling
with winter. Though all these are dearest to my heart,
it did not come from the deep deciduous gorges, animated
and soaring with migratory birds looking for ripening
fruits in sanctified groves. It did not fill the inhospitable
ravines of my soul with the fluffiness of land clouds.
Though I am a true son of the wettest place on Earth,
it did not come baptising like the wind-driven rain
and the impregnating fog.

It happened amidst the squalor of this town's wretched
tenements but not because life was harsh and ignoble
for a strange and ragged rustic, struggling to be
a day-time student, a night-time labourer. Not because
everything had seemed to mock me, from rich girls
giggling on the road to loud boys on bicycles
and young louts playing badminton. Bad times
might have ruled out a normal existence and driven me
up the branches of a pear tree to peer at the playful
world with timid longing, but poetry did not come
because bad times also made me supple as a cane stalk
and taught me the relief of stories and the pleasures
conjured with closed eyes.

Poetry did not come because of the joys and sorrows
of my life. Though later it soaked in everything
like ploughed earth and mirrored everything
like a mountain lake, when it came it had nothing
of leaders with lips of a murmuring brook and hearts
laced with venom like the arrows of war. It carried
nothing of the cold and hard indifference that drove
students to the streets and boys to the therapy
of the gun. It had nothing of the rottenness
that would sell our holy mountain for a car and a few
concubines. It had nothing of blood or riots; nothing
of public or private curfews; nothing of terror, of fake
or genuine encounters; nothing of life or death;
nothing good or bad; nothing beautiful or ugly.

Poetry came like an illness: a young woman, abandoned
and alone with a girl child had seemed to me,
in her loneliness, like a flambeau in the dark lanes
of those nights. Something stirred inside me.
I was racked by a sudden desolate yearning,
something fierce and restless, a gnawing, tormenting
desire to reach out, to touch—
and I scrawled my first few lines, and furtive,
like someone committing a crime, I slipped them
through the door of her two-room residence.

That was my poetry—nakedly, madly in love,
and desperately prayerful. But in its foolishness,
it did not even have a name and my beloved
looked in vain for the man who had called her,
my first poem, ‘Light in the Night'.

Well, as you can see, when I was young my poetry
started with an address to a divorcee, a woman
old enough to be my aunt. Now that I'm almost old,
should I turn to a girl, hopefully chaste, and young enough
to be my student? Maybe someone like you, sipping wine
and smoking a cigarette.

For you, I have gone down the ladder and crawled into
the coal pits of the psyche. But did I ever tell you that you
make me feel stupidly innocent and hopelessly inadequate?

* A kind of cicada.

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