A Malaysian Celebration of Diversity on World Poetry Day, by Dipika Mukherjee
March 21st, 2019 was World Poetry Day. For those of us lucky enough to be at Lit Books that night in Malaysia, it was a feast of poetry at The Noise of Time - Readings on World Poetry Day . Pusaka organized fourteen poets to read poetry in 11 languages (Malay, English, Mandarin, Bengali, Arabic, Persian, German, French, Spanish, Malayalam and Russian...with translations into English). Led by organizer and emcee Pauline Tan, the room resonated with the words of Omar Khayyam, Wang Wei, Paul Eluard, Cesar Vallejo, Else Lasker-Schüler, Bei Dao, Mallika Sengupta, Goenawan Mohamad and many other voices, both ancient and contemporary. I chose to read a Bengali poem by Mallika Sengupta, translated brilliantly by Amit Mukerjee titled Prithibir Ma (Mother of the Universe): Unbound, my hair spread over the sky created dark stormclouds. My green dhanekhali sari became the lush fabric of forests. Stealing the melody from my throat birds chirped into morning s...