THE YAK DILEMMA ...
    FOUR Poems

            ‘your bird/my bird,’
            ‘Hotel Poem, Fatih, Istanbul,’
            ‘Room in Edinburgh’
             & ‘Poem in which
                   I am an Interloper
             in an Art Gallery’

^{In THE YAK DILEMMA, Supriya KAUR DHALIWAL ventures out of the mountain ranges of Palampur and across vast distances of land and sea. From scenes playing out through Dublin windows to ruminating on wearing a Sadri in the West, these innovative mediations are as much about personal identity as they are a testament to the human spirit’s drive to cross territory and forge a ‘map’ of our own. KAUR DHALIWAL’s map, if she has one, is without architecture or foundations; ‘Four walls don’t make a home or a house—it takes some doing’, she writes in Ghazal on Living in a Hotel in Downtown Cairo. She is part of a dynamic new generation of poets pushing the medium into exciting new areas by questioning the notion of ‘place’ and its effect on our bodies—including the human spirit and memory. Uprooted and unsettled, her lyrical voice generously outlines ‘home’ as something other than a physical place. THE YAK DILEMMA is a remarkable poetic journey, its words create new territories by carefully revealing the fragile spaces that fall in between.} 

^{Published by Makina Books
on 15.04.21,
order THE YAK DILEMMA 
direct from the press here.}

your bird/my bird

^{Counted Punjab’s fewer than five rivers for days—
their banter like a lost love’s show, played for days.}

^{All the sources are worth a footnote in essays,
so is the pain that doesn’t go away for days}

^{or doesn’t go away at all like a fatal migraine.
The skies on our side have been grey for days.}

^{The bulbul on the barbed wire knows nothing
of no man’s land. Her claws splay for days}

^{on the razor-wire fence. The telephone cables stay
entangled between poles of decay for days.}

<sup>The distance between Jhelum and Satluj is a wound’s width.
The bulbul circles above it, looking for prey for days. 

She greets the woman who named her daughter
Naseeb (destined not to have to pray for days)

with her birdsong. Like our human speech,
her birdsong has been finding its way for days—

in a dictionary that almost belongs nowhere.
The bulbul yearns to exist in dismay for days

on your land/my land. Your bird/my bird:
what would be claimed as hearsay for days?</sup> 

Hotel Poem,

FATIH, ISTANBUL

I eat my Turkish breakfast in a plate
that is an imitation of Byzantine mosaics

in the Hagia Sophia. Mehmet, the server, asks me
if home for me is Alhind. When I say yes, it is,

he marvels at the grandeur of the Taj Mahal,
where both of us have not been, yet.

Mehmet tells me about the Blue Masjid’s six minarets
and asks if the azaan here reminds me

of the azaan in the Jama Masjid in Dilli.
I admit that I wish I knew

as I have never been to Jama Masjid either.
However, Dilli is nothing like Istanbul.

It does not rain in Istanbul in July
like the way it does in North India.

Here I wake up to a shining view of the Bosphorus
and I sleep to it, feeling the weightlessness of the sea

taking over every night.

Room in
    Edinburgh

Poem in which 
    I am an Interloper
in an Art Gallery 

_{after An Indian Lady, perhaps ‘Jemdance,’
Bibi of William Hickey;
painted by Thomas Hickey in 1787}