@Spock: I wrote the poem for a competition where the theme was ‘war poetry’. I was thinking about how one tends to think of the battlefield or the bombed city as sites of war. But war winds its way into other places as well. Around the same time, I had been thinking about the Gujarat riots as well and about how women’s bodies become the site of aggression. At the same time, I was thinking about how conditions in an actual war are slightly different because the soldiers themselves are often baffled about what their life has become. Thank you for asking.

@Rahul: Hmm, interesting etymology, no? Flight of music, flight of grief.

Regarding your poem Homecoming, can you write about your thought process when you wrote that poem, and what made you write the poem? The last stanzas brings to mind the theme that in a war there are no winners or losers, only victims.

@Spock: How was the Broadway version? Will check out the movies and poem. Thanks!

@Rahul: Fugue is also a term in psychiatry, meaning a pathological amnesiac condition during which one is apparently conscious of one’s actions but has no recollection of them after returning to a normal state. This condition, usually resulting from severe mental stress, may persist for as long as several months. Of course, I use it slightly loosely here.

Thank you for your comment…

Um.. is that a metaphor that I failed to understand? I’m a fan of fugues, from Bach to MJQ, but never associated them with grief — only with abstraction and complexity. So far I haven’t suffered such a close bereavement, but I have seen what it can do to other people. It must have been a very difficult time.