Please join us for the panel Listening to What Endures at Middle Ground: Nepal Literature Festival (HKW) on 02.10.2026 at 20:15 with poets Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Mukahang Limbu. I’ve had the last few days to read a selection of their poems… both these poets converse deeply with their memories, mothers, lands, landscapes, places and voices in their work. Multivocal personhoods, communal risings. Poems are portals and there are so many layers of sound and rhythm in their poetry…  

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s poetry memorialises her immense love for her homeland Tibet and becomes a container for her exile, her mother’s and the Tibetan community’s resistance against Chinese colonisation. Intimate and tender words gather a body of work that plays a revolutionary role in resisting continuums of coloniality and exile. In her poems, I felt a deep intimacy, an undivided communion, as if I was in that space between the pen and the paper. Sometimes it felt as if I was also examining the crude edges of her words with her, meeting them in their changing forms…

“When we build a nation,

we are permanently old and always new.

Mother died a refugee, she thought the status

was a promise of return. She had a version

of nation under the bed. Never mind that her village

took a new name; the jar of water

from her childhood’s river, ten stones and five

twigs were clues that home was transitive.”

Home, a transitive
—Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Mukahang Limbu’s poems reminded me of my own hometown Viluppuram in Tamil Nadu and took me back to pitch green mango trees and honks of the streets. Mukahang’s poetry covers varying worlds, from the labour of his migrant mother to resisting the commodification of the bodies of Gurkhas to reaching out to queer kinships and the interwovenness of it all. Poems have body. Poems on desire queer language and intimacy and dance on page! Movement is rife in Mukahang’s body of work and bursts from the page eagerly, both with life and insight. 

“TAKING THE BINS OUTSIDE

We will remember what we always said to our little girls

You should eat the leaf

You should eat the fruit

But not the entire tree

ROOM 303

WE ARE THE CLEANERS MOURNING

our daughters who always knew if

the lids were left too loose the ants would get in

We see our daughters visiting neon hotels for single nights

in the arms of a wobbly man

We see her head bopping to the breeze forgetting that

nodding

does not mean please we will please don’t hit us”

The Cleaners, Mother of Flip-Flops
—Mukahang Limbu

Excited to be in conversation with these two poets 🙂