space

Into the black coal night seething with rage,

A man in a loin-cloth walks sleepily on the

Last remaining wall of a fallen building.

This strip of wall-top, one storey high, is his castle, his home.

He dusts his pillow onto the dangerous cheek of night -

A night which is possessive - accustomed to stretch its arms and legs

And sleep, comfortably, in this chunk of space.

This man is trespasser.

He could bring others to his wall –

His wife, his brothers and sisters, their children, his village.

The man stares at the night. Below his perch there is a storm of cars,

People have come to eat at Apoorva.

He smiles to himself, content with his bed;

The stars are heavy, dripping with drunken light.

In the corner of the subcontinent, south of Kerala’s toes,

An army of invaders is charging forward.

The stars hear it first, the anger building;

The night shivers with its allies’ advance.

As murdering knives descend into the flesh of night

It retreats fast into the spaces people build to keep nature out

And smirks as water weakens the foundations of its new home.

Only the man is stabbed in his sleep by the rain.

Published in Fulcrum, USA. See http://fulcrumpoetry.org/issues/3

The Helpless God

Black skies at noon

Slice through office blocks.

Up a forgotten passage

In a quiet doorway

A resting god

Opens its eyes

And follows the smog

To the edge of the last light

As the city is stoppered

With an ice black cork.

The god is tired of new lives –

It just wants this one

Plastic ruby eyes

Rimmed with gold leaf

Decide to halt

The descending wrath.

A man disturbs the god

As a tube light flickers on

A client has arrived

To buy space for Commerce One

The god shuts its eyes –

Arrested by the presence of a man

Rules oblige it to act

Only when it cannot be seen.

The wet cold plug expands

Sealing the city shut

Twenty million mouths turn blue

As a suffocated civilization ends.

Centuries later, steel drills at noon

Shatter through office blocks.

An expedition for oil strikes rich -

Thick fountains of chilled blood

Pirouette in the white, sun bleached sky.

Up a forgotten passage

In a quiet doorway

A resting god

Opens its eyes

And follows the whirling blades

To the edge of the red light.

A version of this poem (‘The Resting God’) appeared in Towers of Silence  (A limited edition chapbook , published by Aark Arts).

The Towers of Silence

1

High on the hill,

beneath a fern sky of speckled spores

there is a place I long to describe

in a language I do not know.

The passing of each

beloved one into the rocks and

ivory heart of the pit

in that solitary place is not a passage

we will accept for ourselves, mother, you and I.

Nor did your father, who chose that box of fire,

only fire.

But the thought that we could all

rest together in the sepia shadow of a pit

drilled into the centre of the core –

that is not an empty wish, for after all,

where will our children go to find us?

Will they have to slice through the shifting sky like vultures,

searching for me and you and your father:

ashes choking the sea?

How we thought your father’s

singed remains would be reduced

to one biscuit box, but saw instead

a suitcase of black static residue and

small pieces of bone and how you coughed -

wreaths of minute

grey dust rose through the chimney of Chandanvadi

into the soundless glare of that June day.

It is good, mother,

to have a resting place for family,

a spot to mourn the passing of the centuries and

that which we are;

to remember.

But there are places

that I long to describe

in a language I do not know.

And the Towers, by our not being in them,

that is our sacrifice.

2

Until the time my Spanish is not worthy of anything but mimicry, I will have to describe this place in words I can create especially for the Towers.

If you are an outsider, not one of us, you would be interested to know what happens when we die. Most of my people, if we have been blessed by our exclusive priests in our special temples, in a language, Avesta, which is dead, if we haven’t made the mistake of marrying a man who is one of you, will be prayed upon and carried up the hill on a cherished path, up two stairs or three, through a door and onto a cement bed at the edge of a precipice. The birds do their job (eating us), if there are enough of them, and our antibiotics do not make them immediately sick; and our bones are swept into the pit. The men who provide this service are poor, lower caste and dedicated, they are born to this profession – body carriers, body sweepers, maintenance engineers of the Towers of Silence.

  

3

Why Spanish? It is a knowledge that there are words that can describe this place better than the ones I already know. Silent spectacles of words that form like clouds and beat thunderous drums with brocade batons.

4

Shadows in a garden of ochre thread

Vitiligo branches which echo

The brown whispers of a festering pea-hen

Hay fields, grass grown yellow from the start.

The English description of this hill is so still, so deathly quiet.

Spanish would somehow make it eloquent,

the Hill that drips with human dead.

More distant than Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Marathi. These are too close and yet impassive to my touch.

This is no English green, where graveyards rise, like fresh,

dew kissed soldiers in the valley of life.

No Tintern Abbey, roof collapsed,

not even a river here, blue and sweet.

This is one landscape

too burnt for English words,

there is no poetry

in the English sounds

nor richness in their beats.

Why look at this that escapes onto the page –

there is a place high on a hill, surrounded by a malignancy of skyscrapers.

No rhythm there.

So there must be some other tongue to say-

this is a place I long to describe

in a language I do not know.

First Published in the UK, in Poetry London http://www.poetrylondon.co.uk/ 
& 
in India in Chandrabhaga