In a world that celebrates noise—where poetry performs more than it communicates, where voices are flung like flags across the wind—some poets come from a lineage that spoke in silences. Many of their stories weren’t told; they were steeped in spice jars, pressed beneath prayer mats, tucked into the folds of ritual. This issue, ‘Memories of Future’, emerges from that hush—from humans erased by history, from dreams where the dead linger, from the textures of memory that outlive flesh.
For poets like Nnadi Samuel and Eram Asrar, their poems are small but symbolic acts of exhumation—crafted like one prepares for burial: with care, with rage, with reverence. They are offerings, much like another poet’s grandmother’s roti for the dead—warm, torn by hand, filled with everything they never said aloud.
Feby Joseph remembers his grandfather, light-footed and laughing, running through the hills with the little poet on his shoulders. And yet, when the poet and his brothers lifted his coffin, its weight nearly broke them. The dead do that—quietly remind us of what we carry. He also exclaims:
as if all of grandfather’s organs – brain, lungs,
heart, stomach, kidneys, liver and other coily
innards, that stayed up to keep him moving
when he was alive, suddenly decided
to give up in his wake – take a well-deserved
break and without any care sink like
stone – morbid, dead weight!
Rachel Linton rues about the impossibility of retrieving the past through a future feat, where the Universe conjures all the possibilities to lure her into its nostalgic core, the heart resists.
They say you can’t go home again.
Google Maps says: yes, you can.
It’s a day and seven hours of driving,
of course, and there’s nothing left
for you there, but you could try it;
an old, broken instinct, like sea turtles
going back to the beaches where
they were born, hoping there will still be
a warm, soft place
to land.
Subash Sundaravadivelu’s experiential sonic poems finds in his rhymes. His self-reflexivity is at once ironic and empathetic:
His stomach growled,
but I wrote his hunger down.
Turned it into a stanza.
I want to tell him
the water will not stay.
But I don’t know how
to explain eviction
to someone who still trusts rain.
From a rich basket of submissions, we have carefully chosen eleven poets for this issue—each offering a distinct voice, a singular vision, and a poem that lingers. What you read here is not just verse—not entirely. It is memory made flesh, dream made deliberate, and the echo of voices that history tried to silence. Each poem rises like a tongue from the soil, fluent in a language passed down not through speech, but through gesture, grief, ritual. This is the inheritance of silence—not absence, but a buried archive that I have unearthed and shaped into sound. These are not poems of nostalgia, but of return—of futures imagined by remembering. What was once buried now breathes again, not as ghost but as witness. And in speaking them aloud, we at Usawa, make space—not just for the dead, but for the living who still carry their stories in the marrow of their bones.
