As part of the festival, Prakriti Foundation organised a Poetry Contest. Here are the winning entries :

1st Prize

Many Mondays Later

I'm hardly yours Anil.
It was 10 p.m.

your flannel-checked shirt like
a technicolor chessboard revealed
thick, curled strands of hair
and glimmering below was
gram-coloured
sweat-shaded
chest.
It was 10. 02 when
I had vowed to pluck every
plastic button out with
my bare teeth,
until I reached the golden
buckle of your belt.
It was 10.08, my gums weak;
I had cheated - used two fingers
to yank out the last of the buttons.
10.10, and I had opened the fly
of your stitched pants, with
the smell of recent tailoring,
By 10.12, my hands floundering,
I could see stray strands
of your moustache
quivering with heavy breath.
10.14 and some negligible
seconds later, before the
mobile vibrated,
before you zipped up,
your wife had a craving for chaat,
and your kids, cake-fudge,
and a drive to the new airport.

I'm hardly yours Anil.

- Deepika Arvind

2nd prize

Little Girls

I love little girls on swings

I love little girls for whom i buy pomegranates, only because it is the mad, ridiculous, sad, poetic tradition of a doomed-to-failure romance which started 4 years ago and will continue for who knows how long

I love little girls who wait damp-eyed and shivering with hurt, on the morning of their exams, waiting for two broad arms to wipe away the bruises and gashes of burly lorries

I love little girls who write me asking me whether i have found any new mad ones to liberate when she is the mad one whom i most want to liberate, but she must do it herself

I love little married women who just for a night will be whirled and twirled by a stranger just to forget marriage and be like little girls once more

I hate little girls whom i once knew when they tell me they are going to be married

I love little full-blown, full-grown women who were once the shadows of little girls

I love little girls who walk on housefences, fall off, heal away the scratches with their tears and then laughing jump back onto the fence to try and climb the gooseberry tree,

I love little girls who promised me eternity and when i call them in the whirlpool of time to say, "How you?" they say, "I'm fine, I live for the moment. Goodbye"

I love little girls who dreamt of riding wild horses bare-backed in circuses and made copious, detailed plans to run away with other little girls who write out cowboy westerns in 200 page homework notebooks

I love little girls who jump out of school buses to walk with a pimple-faced, chicken pox- scarred boy who is 2 inches taller than her and hence; he is her "tall, dark and handsome" sweetheart

I love little girls who were date-raped as teenagers; healed in lonely nightmares for two years and then returned with dreams of forever, miracles and raw ripe rampant raging rancid gentle beauty

I love little girls who hurtle over the handlebars of drunk cycles, and when people point out the tell-tale scars on their face they smile coyly and say, "I'm just wearing the make-up of the road."

I love little girls who were slapped in front of the world once by their fathers for back-answering, never spoke forever after and carried their stony silences to their graves

I love little girls who when I ask them to show me some love, expecting nothing more than a hug, lean forward on tip-toe and kiss me on the lips,

I love little girls who call me bang centre in the middle of working day afternoons and say, "What's it going to be, one beer or ten?"

I love little girls who thought that the pre-menstrual syndrome was a bad joke because they never ever felt it- but now they know better,

I love little girls whom i always thought were unemotional- because they said so; and when i asked them when was the last time they cried, they smiled sadly and said, "last night."

I love flirting with old wrinkled sorrowful shrews because then they flash the homecoming-to-heaven smiles of little girls

I love little girls too rich to be themselves, too clever to stop dreaming, too scared to follow the footsteps of their dreams; but yet walk for six hours straight with strangely dressed strangers only to talk about those dreams

I love little girls in wolves' clothing who can devour without eating, smile softly and then say they are vegetarian,

I love little girls who roam lonesome Indian bars at night, and mount their killings on a coffee table the next morning with their girlfriends, while promising to join the PETA and not wear leather, or mink, or sable, or fur or any other animal skin except that which is human

And I cry helplessly like little girls do when little frail women after the soul-jarring, flesh-defacing, bone-belting ardours of pregnancy churn out beautiful little baby girls and then weep because they did not mother sons

I love little girls who love little boys enough to make their wildest dreams come true

I love little boys too.

- Dominic Franks

3rd prize

No borders

1.Poems sit on walls.
Moss-covered words fall gently
on my neighbour's page.


2.That yellow page has wings.
Van Gogh blue plumes fly across
seas named in old books.


3.I travel with those
books inside metal boxes
dancing on shy waves.


4.Waves lick distant shores,
land of a virgin language
looking for my tongue.



5.My tongue speaks mango
words, yellow with ripe meanings.
Drip into islands.


6.Islands float, brushing
against each other without
passports. No limits.


7.No limits here. Where
suns dip into syllables,
orange clouds hitch-hike.


8.Clouds, budget travellers
seeking summer tan under
sun-dried similes.


9.Similes wave from
a passing ship that sails to
those empty countries.

10. Empty countries wait.
Bowls that long for fish swimming
across language lakes.

11. I become a lake
but no lotus blooms in here
only poems of yore.


12. My poems sit on walls
watch over neighbours, countries.
Poems have no borders.

- Anupama Raju