Picture courtesy: White Sliced Cake on Yellow Ceramic Plate by Ron Lach, Pexels. 

Hello everyone,

Sanaa here (aka adashofsunny)

Today, we are running LIVE for the first one hour of the bar i.e. from 3PM to 4PM EST. If you wish to join in to read out your poem, just link up, and you will be called upon to do so in respective order. Here is the link below:

https://meet.google.com/jkd-hhaf-pyu

If you don’t feel like reading that’s all right too! You can just listen.

A few words of advice:

We are using Google Meet, which means that you should be able to click on the link and run it in the browser, but if that doesn’t work download the app and run it on your Smartphone or Tablet.

I recommend that you use a headset for the best experience, and please mute your microphone when you are not talking.

As the month of November begins, I am reminded of poems by Pablo Neruda, who writes in a variety of styles, including surrealist poems, historical epics, overtly political manifestos, a prose autobiography and passionate love poems such as the ones in his collection, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924).

Here is one of my favorites by Neruda:

Drunk as Drunk (translated from Spanish by Christopher Logue)

Drunk as drunk on turpentine
From your open kisses,
Your wet body wedged
Between my wet body and the strake
Of our boat that is made of flowers,
Feasted, we guide it – our fingers
Like tallows adorned with yellow metal –
Over the sky’s hot rim,
The day’s last breath in our sails.

Pinned by the sun between solstice
And equinox, drowsy and tangled together
We drifted for months and woke
With the bitter taste of land on our lips,
Eyelids all sticky, and we longed for lime
And the sound of a rope
Lowering a bucket down its well. Then,
We came by night to the Fortunate Isles,
And lay like fish
Under the net of our kisses.

His poems are wonderful, aren’t they? Do let me know your favorite one in the comment section. For now, let’s link up one poem!

I look forward to welcoming you on Google Meet.