What Came to me by Jane Kenyon
Thursday, January 29, 2009
I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.
It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on th porcelain lip.
I grieved for you then
as I never had before.
Listening to Mukesh by Pooja Nansi
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
listening to mukesh Driving to your block, I slide in my father’s cassette of old Hindi songs and I am humming in twilight to the legendary playback singer’s baritone releasing those sounds in that language that makes me feel like I am home. In the back of my throat, I can taste my grandmother’s translucent thin chappatis that as children we would to the light, the dough so evenly rolled out by her hands that not one lump would show. I never appreciated them till her hands she could no longer grip the rolling pin. I hear the children from the slum two-storey apartment block. They are swearing in that deliciously punctuated rhythm only the born-and-bred tongue can dance to. I am home for a while. I can smell dust and kerosene in the air and hear blending without objection into the stone thud bass Jamming my brakes at a traffic light, I realise home is supposed to be these dustless streets and the smells are alien culinary concoctions, that my migrant tastebuds I have taught my tongue to like the garlic sting of Hainanese chili paste and form some Hokkien curse words. It even enjoys the harsh bite of it, but it is not a taste, a language that makes my heart sing like these notes on my car stereo. Jaoon kaha batayen dil, Duniya badi hain sangdil Chandini Aiyen Ghar Jalane Sujhe Na Koyi Manzil. Tell me where I should go in a world filled with indifference. The moonlight filters into my house, But I do not belong, neither can I think of a destination.
hold up
shook so much,
that emerged behind my grandparents small
high-pitched devotions to the gods
of the latest film song.
like pigs’ knuckles and chicken anatomy,
cannot migrate towards.
For
the poets
who knew that if
all the poems in the world
were loaded onto the backs of trucks
and incinerated, no one might even notice for days
the death of poetry would cause far less consternation
than if the electricity or water taps were turned off all over
even for a few hours , and yet the poets continue to write
because they know perfectly well that trucks, taps
and all those other magical gadgets would
have about as much chance of existing
as babies without parents, if poets
had not first invented
poetry