Large cuckoo shrike

It is an unobtrusive bird found throughout Indian peninsula (except the western region and south East Asia), having a loud call that is infrequently used. Seen perched motionless on high branches of large trees for long period. Interestingly cuckoo shrikes are neither related to cuckoos or shrikes but are closely related to orioles. They have greyish to white plumage with grey barring on lower part, broad bill that is slightly notched at the edge, tail moderately long, rounded and graduated.

Dear daughter of Iraq dies in exile

Probably as a painful metaphor on the contemporary world we live in one of the finest Arabic Iraqi poetess died in exile at Cairo few years back. Nazek Al Malaika (1923-2007) was one of the earliest to write Arabic poems in freestyle rather than classical rhyme. Unlike what we see now Iraq in mid 20th century was culturally vibrant, it was in this milieu that she was influenced by Shelley, Byron and so on (her autobiography also talks of influence from poets like Mahmoud Hassan Ismail, Badawi Al-Jabal, Amjad Al-Tarabolsi, Omar Abu Risha and Bishara Khouri) and moved away from the rigid metric and rhyme schemes of classical poetry and start to explore modern topics. Her first collection of poems was published in 1947 under the title ‘Night’s Lover’ and her second collection, entitled ‘Sparks and Ashes,’ came out two years later. These poignant lines from “To wash disgrace” brings out the horror of honor killing.

Oh mother, a rattle, tears and darkness
Blood gushed out, and the stabbed body trembled.
“Oh mother!” Heard only by the executioner
Tomorrow the dawn will come and roses will wake up
Youth and enchanted hopes will ask for her
The meadows and the flowers will answer:
She left to wash the disgrace.
The brutal executioner returns
And meets people
“Disgrace!” He wipes his knife
“We’ve torn it apart.”
And returned virtuous with a white reputation.

Once she got up in the morning to hear on the radio a report on the number of Cholera deaths made her write her well-known poem "The Cholera". Few lines from the poem "The night is silent, listen to the effect of groans, in the depth of darkness, below the silence, on the dead." "Night came to a standstill listen to the echoes of wails in the dark of night, under silence and on corpses death, death, death humanity laments." (these are the only few lines I could manage from the Net, frankly despite visiting hundreds of website I really couldn’t get much). This poem was path breaking and when she wrote these she was criticized for lack musicality and rhyme but said she “Say whatever you wish to say. I am confident that my poem will change the map of Arab poetry.” And sure it did!!. Ironically many decades later much to the dismay of her admirers she initiated counter revolution against free verses as she thought the beauty of poetry was getting degraded.

These brilliant lines from the poem “Song for the Moon”

Stay as you are, a secret world
Not such thing as a soul discerns
Spinner of poems, the last muse
In a world whose mirrors are dimmed
What song did not flow with honey
If you were to smile your praise upon it?

This my favorite, lines from “Love Songs for Words”
Why do we fear words?
Some words are secret bells, the echoes
of their tone announce the start of a magic
And abundant time
Steeped in feeling and life,
So why should we fear words?

“The Sea Changes its Color” has become my all time favorite, it is such a refreshingly ecstatic little poem despite translation (it sure is a great work of translation).
My love.
My rapture was a sea.
Which changed its colours,
the sockets of its eyes turning black and green.
It threw its waves ahead, forged pearls
Flowed into springs,
landed on shores.
Created tides,
made islands.
Scattered,
across the blue of the gulf,
a blond archipelago.

As Ezra Pound once said great poems should be written regardless of who writes them, we live in fortunate times to be able to read these poems.