Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2026
Where do you belong? I ask myself, poems by Randhir Khare.
These two poems are from my new book, which is a definitive selection of 50 years of my poetry 1975 to 2025 to be published by Redriver Press in 2026.
Where do you belong?
In the crevasses of palm-lines
moving inexorably towards creaseless skin
till they dissolve in perfection?
In the breath of the void yearning for flesh
and the musk-hour of embrace wet with song?
Where do you belong?
Do you belong to a song before it had words
to a womb before it conceived
to the truth before it mutated to the terrible emptiness
of a lie
to love waiting to be discovered?
To a seed in the forest of being?
I wait for answers
hope for answers
in streets full of days and nights full of empty rooms
a clock outside the window counting the hours
and the moon pressing its face on the window pane
Listen to me in the silence of your night
if your day is too crowded with doing
and the shells of your ears are too flooded with voices of praise
Sit down for a moment, just a moment,
close your eyes, breathe deeply,
its morning….
there’s something in the air –
an old familiar fragrance
not of flowers or clothes or the earth after a shower
or the perfume of a smile
0r your skin sun-glowing after-love, something,
remember what it is till it becomes flesh
or it will dissolve
and you’ll forget where you are, who you are,
your beginning…
you will forget you are here
alive…
answer me – where do you belong?
A gypsy longs for freedom
I swallow the sky
in globs when its treacle,
live fish bulging my cheeks,
scales brushing their way down,
dissolve, fumes spread in my lungs,
heart pounding its limits,
stretching arteries of longing,
flying flowing fields and orchards,
bursting into rivers
gorging along foreverness,
away from homes and belonging,
spaces beyond spaces, mountain lines
rising, falling into dusk,
the thrusting persists.
Insomnia-drunk, lids pasted back
floating on waking dreams,
shaman moving with mist
in the breeze,
steam from tarred roads rising
indifferent heat, burning bubbles
on skin, sweat spurting into springs
into streams into rivers into seas;
I have been Moses parting turgid thighs,
crossing from shore to shore,
walking with whirlpools,
sinking into the centre, bloated
with love and birth.
Fly, fly from hunger, home
and loss and broken promises,
smell of giving sticks to my skin,
I wash it away with indifference,
long for the speed of light,
swelling with helium; will
I rise, spirit? Will I rise?
Will I rise above my clutching needs?
musk from parted seas quiver
with spentness, leaving me nothing.
I want to be a blur, dissolve, evaporate,
be free, become again
the horizon, moving;
stillness alters my being, makes me
a parasite, sucking sweat and blood
of love, togetherness and expectations,
promising to give what I do not have,
giving what is not mine, hoping for
what cannot be, what will not be, what
should not be, the buzz of dependence.
The sky oppresses me, the earth resists,
open palms cannot unlock my fists;
every word I speak makes me another,
every stranger smiles and calls me brother;
damned belongingness and damned be ‘I’
damned be the bed of nails on which I lie,
I fear the coming rain, the earth that flowers,
teeming forests blooming crimson hours,
there is no end, there is no end
there is no freedom around the bend.
© Randhir Khare
Randhir Khare is a national and international award-winning poet, writer, artist and folklorist. He has thirty-nine books to his credit, performed his poetry in twelve concerts, exhibited his art in seven solo shows and has inspired the work of photographers, artists and actors, and has collaborated with A.R Rahman who has set his poems to music.
His work has over the years been published by Penguin Random House India, HarperCollins India, Niyogi Books, Sakal Publications, Silvercord Publishing, Rupa Books, River Books and a host of smaller presses. As an educationist and arts practitioner for the last fifty years he has brought alive literature for eight to thirty-year-olds through dramatic readings and performances. His novels The Legend of Creaky and The Last Jungle on Earth were adapted on several occasions for the stage and used for creative workshops for The Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai and The Prithvi Theatre Summertime workshops. They have also been adopted by schools as rapid readers.
As storyteller, he has collected and performed numerous folktales which he has performed for various audiences and collected them in a video titled The World in a Story. More recently he has performed for video a series of his original stories and used them in schools as discussion points and art activities.
He is the recipient of the Sanskriti Award for Creative Writing, the Sahitya Akademi’s Residency Award, The Palash Award for Lifetime Achievement in Education and Culture, The Pegasus Gold Medal for Poetry awarded by the Union of Bulgarian Writers and a host of other prizes that recognise his contribution to literature and Education. As director of The Rewachand Bhojwani Academy in Pune he has introduced a number of arts and literature programmes including the Library Alive project. Two books, THE BOOK OF DAWN and TARA, THE DOG WHO ALWAYS WAS have just been released.