London/Delhi-based Kusum Lata Sawhney’s poems are an emphatic description of our altered world after the arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic. A continuous preface of a single phrase heads each poem: ‘We might have …’. With that Sawhney takes us in several directions, from the personal to the collective, from the negative to the positive, from reality to a better, imagined world, and so on.
‘We might have seen it coming
A different world, a novel approach
We might have learnt to wash anew
Our hands and vegetables sanitised
in the spirit of the new…’
The poems are an anthology of aptly summarised thoughts which we’ve all had this past year – yet only a poet can express them with empathy, range and depth. ‘From the first news of the virus to the epilogue, it was a constant diary of daily happenings as they unraveled,’ says Sawhney – her poems juggle many emotions; sorrow and joy, acceptance, integration, dependence. She tempers humankind’s ongoing reality with beautiful, visceral passages in verse that take the edge of the harshness and also suggest a way forward.
Sawhney’s collection is compiled as a set of 60 separate poems that gain momentum in the course of the writing as events unfold in reality. ‘Writing this collection of poems was akin to going on a prolonged and intense journey twice, l led with myriad emotions as one encountered the profound depths of the unknown and came away with a barrage of unsettling questions,’ says Sawhney.
When the unravelling happens, will we find what we seek?
Sawhney poses this really important question right at the beginning as she introduces her collection. As she proceeds with each poem one finds that all her ‘might haves’ are disturbingly truthful. These quotes below are from separate poems:
‘We might have seen it coming
These days and nights of despairing…’
‘We might have seen it coming
The dark noosed fungus looming…’
‘We might have seen it coming
A red rage, so full of fury…’
Sawhney’s poems alert us like prophecies, one after the other, to a world at the cusp of a sea change. She reaches several conclusions as she ends her anthology; thankfully her most hopeful thoughts hinge on the wish that the future is not entirely bleak and that humanity can choose to be on a more empathetic path ahead.
You can download ‘We Might Have’ from Amazon for Kindle and follow @kusumlatasawhney on Instagram and at www.kusumlatasawhney.com
Below you’ll find the prologue and epilogue of ‘ We Might Have‘ set to sound and video.
