Now ?? ???? – Eeshita Azad

We Londoners, we come in all different sizes, shapes, shades and languages. Yet our experiences are the same. A year ago life in this city meant grabbing coffee in the morning, rushing to catch the tube, buying fans in the summer and getting ready for BBQs. And now it means missing older parents, balancing home schooling and working from home, and on desperate evenings ordering takeaway curry! With the form of my poem, I wanted to mirror this shared humanity between all cultures. This technique in English poetry is called ‘coupling’. The ‘first lines’ are ‘found’, the following lines are ‘responses’ to the ‘found lines’. In this case all the ‘found lines’ are from the postcard contributions from volunteers and visitors to the Crick vaccination centre.

The first time I read through the wealth of donated quotes and responses I was floored. Everyone felt everything, collectively! Inspired by this realisation my Bengali poem is ‘coupling’ with the donated English lines. The lines vary from direct translation to subtle responses in Bengali. So in essence we are all reading the same poem in different ways, feeling the same emotions that reflect our one singular (pandemic) experience.

Artist Bio

Eeshita Azad is a poet, a creative producer and an arts facilitator with a career spanning 15 years in New York, London and Dhaka. She is the Executive Director of British Bangladeshi Poetry Collective (BBPC) and has directed their production for last year’s Tower Hamlets Council’s Season of Bangla Drama Festival. She won best performer prize at the International Women’s Day Poetry jam, RichMix, London 2007. She collaborated with cartoonist Syed Rashad Imam Tanmoy of Cartoon movement fame and performed her visual-poetry at Hay Dhaka in 2013 and she published Elegiac Songs with Journeyman Books in 2018.

Read the other poems here:

Survive(d) – Hanna Ali

Of Partings & Preludes – Momtaza Mehri

??????? – Nazneen Ahmed

MementoUs – Keisha Thompson