I Won’t Find Another You: Their best love poems face our hard times

The Love Anthology Cover

By Ashraf Aboul-Yazid, President,
Asia Journalists Association

CAIRO: “I Won’t Find Another You” ; a bilingual anthology of best love poems in English and Hindi, has been published recently. I am grateful to editor and poet Thangjam Misna Chanu (Misna Chanu) who gave me the chance to read the English poems and write the back cover blurb.  Santosh Bakaya wrote the foreword, and Ayathuri Santhan wrote another blurb while a hundred poets gave their poems.

In the midst of difficult times, the heart of impossible wishes, and under the low ceilings of dreams, we want someone to sing of love and peace. We hope to read about hope, and we wish that there will be someone who awakens our humanity. This is the role of poetry as poetess Misna Chanu writes it in this anthology collection of poems “I Won’t Find Another You”.

The poetess establishes a parallel and integrated world, a world overflowing with love in its vocabulary, drawing its sky with love stars and clouds, and planting its land with love flowers and songs.

Falling in love could be happening softly, but narrating it poetically is hard. You want to create unique scenes to avoid falling in repetition. I believe Misna Chanu succeeded to do this from the bottom of her heart, pen and imagination:

I Won’t Find Another You

Between red and pink,

You are the shade

That exists.

Between despair and desire

You are the dream

I behold tenderly.

Between fairytales and chronicles,

You are my love story

Written on the peripheral

Of my soul.

Between happiness and sadness

You are the smile that

Rejuvenates life.

Between my song and silence

You are the melody

That lingers on and on

As a prayer or as a hymn.

Between my days and nights

You are the dawn

That I have been waiting for.

When you touched my hands,

My soul was touched for eternity

When you took me in your arms

I was finally home, my love!

Perhaps, I found you,

Only to lose you again

But deep within my soul

I know I have loved you

In many forms, in many lives

And I know I won’t find another you

Again, in this life!

Editor and poet Thangjam Misna Chanu (Misna Chanu)

This is a call for an eternal love, for someone she won’t find another him. Here, the poetess is the voice of all youth hearts and free minds.

The voices in the anthology gives us different reflections, Hussein Habasch, as “The poet reads your eyes in the darkness” … who asks his beloved to come on, take everything, heaven, earth, planets, galaxies, oceans, seas, springs, rivers, forests, gardens, orchards, trees, flowers, mountains… the whole universe from beginning to end! “And let me look into your two divine eyes!”

Eliza Segiet  has her own beloved one: She painted him with thoughts, she even felt a touch. Silky hands drawing on her lips the shape of love. She was with him, probably at the end of the earth pulsating like…like life.

For Job Degenaar, “love sometimes comes from the deep it arises like a woman on an escalator on her way to fashion”. But for Sanjukta Dasgupta her love is affected by fear of loss: “ I love you more every moment because I know I will never meet you in this life!”

Love makes poetess Maria do Sameiro Barroso give her bright colors to the world around, with full senses.

So did the figures who authored this collection of poems (in English); Sunita Pant Bansal, Alessandra Vinotto, Metin Cengiz, Kavita Ezekiel Mendonca, Sharbaditya Bandopadhyay, Lilla Latus, Rati Agnihotri, Rajan Kailas, Aleksandra Sołtysiak, Mary Anne Zammit, Magdalena Kapuścińska, Waheeda Hussain, Seema Jain , Satinder Kaur, Mohini Sharda, Wolfgang Hermann, Barbara Anna Gaiardoni, Mark Andrew Heathcote, Elma Lalnunsiami Darnei, Bannie Bandibas, Sangeeta Dey Roy, Maid Corbic, Anna Maria Mickiewicz, Sonali Chanda, Subhrasankar Das, Nabanita Sengupta, Col Pradeep Kumar, Roopali Sircar Gaur, Dr. R. Janatha Kumari, Braja  K  Sorkar, Neelam Saxena Chandra, Nina Kossman,  Dr. Kamaljit Chirom, Xanthi Hondrou-Hill, Sebolelo Victoria Mokhele, Katarzyna Brus- Sawczuk and Arco Van Ieperen.

The other section has 51 poems in Hindi.