}} Boat Building by Mona Zote |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Boat Building by Mona Zote

The question of being drowned or afloat
Does not really matter.
These days you can hear it
How everyone is building boats
How you can walk down the cramped streets
And hear above the everyday
The sound of someone deploying a hammer
Steadily as she goes
A sound soaring clear above all else

I think, he’s building a boat
He needs to go away
He wants to make sure everyone is safe
Because the water’s rising
Maybe he needs to bring something back home
Things we need
Things he thinks we need
Maybe it’s a shipment of warm sweatshirts
Maybe it’s a good politician or two
Maybe it’s all this gold everyone is so wild about
Maybe it’s oranges from those other hills.

And sometimes, above the laughter of this man,
You see a startled cloud of birds
Bursting out from their sloppy nests
In a brief blind whirl of instinct
Ringing the air around the house that alarmed them
Forgetting soon, in their own way,
What they were afraid of
Just seconds ago
Because they are easily distracted.

So today or yesterday, I went shopping
I noted many things:
First, how the shopkeepers look up
With eyes that think they know you
Better than the last arms that held you.
Second, how there were so many girls
Walking from shop to shop
Stopping in the doorways
With vague powdered faces.
Third, how taking a dress out
Into the sunlight
Changes its colour and tone
Often it becomes friendlier.

Sometimes when I hold your hand
I think, how can you guide the tiller anymore
It feels small and not completely there
The skin thin as onion peel
I remember it being strong and healthy, mother,
Holding my hand with assurance
Until I remember

As I know nothing about boats,
I cannot give the boat builder advice
I can only ask him questions
About the wind’s speed, the drowsiness of being mid-ocean,
The snapping of sails, the urgency
Of sighting land when your barrels have run dry.
He frowns at the houses careening on their concrete stilts
And says something about clouds
How you can’t trust them even if you love them.
At least they are consistently clouds.

I ask about provisions and if hard tack
Can make salt water taste better.

Here where the houses like to live dangerously,
Someone is building a boat for a river
Someone is building a ship for the sea
I look but I can only see many blue hills
Gold is spilling down the streets
The women are beautiful and the men are strong
I am sure their children will be angelic singers.
Boat building is a child’s endeavour.

 
 
First published in The Indian Quarterly (Vol 5, Issue 4, July-Sept 2017)