Corona Diary : Before and Beyond
Harshita Srivastava
Writers Workshop

Entries of a diary don’t expect a reader, a poem does. ‘A lump of time/ Stuck in the throat/ Of this universe,/ An old dusty book/ With a new name,/ A white bird/ Following white birds/ On their way home,/ Storms, tears, love –/ They’re all here.’ This ‘write-up’, titled ‘24.03.20’, that appears in the ‘Corona Diary’ section of Harshita Srivastava’s book ‘Corona Diary, Before & Beyond’ displays the making that is essential for a poem; it is carefully crafted and lively. Sincerity and honesty are what we search for in poetry and we expect these two to satisfy our voyeuristic pleasures in a diary. ‘Confined into spaces/ Of a few inches/ With people hidden inside,/ They are grumbling./ Walls, screens, doors –/ All begin to look/ Like chains./ Look beyond,/ Watch./ Not everyone is home.’ (28.03.2020) Harshita is looking into the void that life, at times, appears not to be. The drab surrounding, the reign of silence, the isolation – everything of the pandemic phase is meticulously described in these ‘untitled’ pieces, and making the poems look like diary entries effortlessly add an element of play-acting on the part of the poet. The poems pretend to be something that will never be read by others, they do not have titles; only dates filling that space separate one poem from another – and this style add up as there are poems which even being less evocative than the ones they are flanked by, successfully manage to sustain the tone of the book – contributing to the noise Harshita wants to make. There are two more sections in the book – ‘Before’ and ‘Beyond’; the poems in those sections, not bound to maintain the uniformity in style between the pieces of a series, introduce variation to the voice of the poet in the collection.