Head up, looked around
Metal bodies, that’s what I found
Many running on the ground
To the bottom of sea floor – some drowned
From the land to the sky
It’s metal all around.

Inside, there is an urge for authenticity;
for metaphor - unadulterated expression -
which strips my skin bare, holds me up
to whipping winds and striking dusts: I am the
  Tanner

preparing my own skin. I would trim excess
fat and sinew and soak and stretch it thin,
like partchment, naked in the world's eye -
  Yet I don't know how
  To make my words transparent.

It takes honesty to thrive in insecurity
And bare the storm that afronts all
  Being;
To make my words discreet
Symbols:
Pillows on empty dreams. She is the
  pacifier, the lover and tyrant - all in one.

So, I don't know how to show
what I want to show. How to
use words, form, syntax and
language to convey meaning.
I say what it is that I want to
say and that is all, no more
Than that. But that is what is
so
  naked
About poetry. The
  doubt

that interrogates every line - really - a
forced-pauser, preventer, wall that stretches
infinitely narrow across every dimension.
It is what makes the end. Never

  the end

I hide in words — tucking under their shade;
Dressing letters up with sequins and baubles.
Now showering in limelit obfuscation.
Makes it seem as if I am really there:

Dressing letters up with sequins and baubles
Blinding myself in the flashing of their colours;
Makes it seem as if I am really there
Amidst flowered touchless abstraction.

I blind myself in the flashing of their colours.
Submerged in repetition, my thumb drowns
Amidst flowered touchless abstraction,
Swirling in whirlpool ******* me underneath:

Submerged in repetition, my thumb drowns
Now showering in limelit obfuscation,
Swirling in whirlpool ******* me underneath.
I hide in words — tucking under their shade.

the moon has died in a poem
overused and forlorn
its avatar is rising
in blazig pixels and scorn

we are at this threshold
one foot in the moon
the subtelty of dying will be
presented on Zoom

Godot isn't coming but
I am waiting too

the surface of the cooking table
the edges of the air
the clarity of a blank page
your shivering skin
the tenderness of tears
the discipline of screaming
the eroticism of fingers
the yoke of the ramen soup
the confessions of dance
the blindness of power
all these and their forgetting
hijack the world
from falling into itself

An Open Invitation to All Poets on Hello Poetry

Dear poets,

I’m starting a collaborative writing project called “Our Time Capsule — The 21st Century.”
It’s a collective space where we, as writers of this era, can capture what life feels like right now—through poems, reflections, metaphors, and symbols.

This is not just about politics or technology or trends.
It’s about how it feels to be alive in this century:
The loneliness and the love,
The silence behind the screens,
The beauty, the fear, the ordinary days,
The things we wish the future would understand about us.

You’re warmly invited to join. Write in your own style—haiku, free verse, letters, experimental forms, anything. Just tag your work with:

#OurTimeCapsule
(or mention the project name in the notes)

Let’s create a time capsule made of words, one poem at a time.
Someday, someone may read what we write today and understand our century—not from textbooks, but from our hearts.

If this resonates with you, join in. I’ll be posting mine soon.

— Yashkrit Ray

the fullness of words in your mouth
my trembling hands
a truth cuts deep
into the ribs of morning
it's the big bang of language
when silence has no shadow

in the laboratory of life unseen words are sprouting
they decenter time or they hit themselves against
the windows like birds do
they circle the emotional memory of our aorta
they smell of dust mixed with blood
they search for that place in your gaze where
is never too hot

words are embryos of some thoughts,
it must be said they were arbitrary were they were born
their calling as deep as the alphabet of time
in a preformed space it was already there
the force that keeps a me apart from we
my mother fed me with words day and night
in a time when the word Babel was so tall

is poetry a shortcut or a detour into the unthinkable?
a compromise with the death of language
we anesthetize the dawn getting rid of memory
we ventilate emotions through our muscles
but the Carnot cycle keeps spinning
an emotional engine escaping precision,  not questions
unsaturated images in our stories, an unruly body
suffused with misery and dreaming
I will write an endless poem till darkness exhausts itself  
as a diver who runs out of oxigen

when sand storms are triggered in my hands
black cloths cover the mirrors
I have died an unfelt death

some days I can't help wondering what would
Anna Karenina say to madame Bovary
let's say they exchange ruminations, decide the future of clouds,
wonder if memory works like the fossils trapped in sand beds
ask one another what lipstick colour is trendy this year in Paris, Milan or Madrid
argue over their genesis, who is the winner
mind heart bone tissue trapped together
no, not sure about their order in a female lineage
do they descend from the Great Mother or
were they born from the head of Zeus
talk about anything but love: moonless nights, Kafka,
the purpose of life, the fragility of leaves, Victorian women
Madame dreams of Freud, Anna knows Darwin
contrary to their inbuilt frame of reference they wait for a fresh dawn,
touch their bodies with female eagerness.
behind their eyes love's net is heavy with meaning

this body a structure of rupture filled with words
their censorship - an act of love but
I can still feel their rawness, tenderness,
the milk of light, the roundness of sunset
I'll give them away to the rites of spring
to the procession of the shadows that carry us with them
to the unexpected burst of you like the morning light
poetry works best in silence

Every year the desert
           (with d from devils)
advances fifteen kilometers
           (with k from karma)
dries up springs
            (with s from spirits)
dries up more and more words.
The dictionary is ever more famished -
essences on the leap
stop for a second over the abyss,
then whiten the cracked earth.
The poet watches
the pure skulls of the words;
the words, still living and hungry,
watch the poet.

By Grete Tartler, translated by Liviu Bleoca