Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
They came
Found my mother
Harvesting ancestral prayers
In the arteries
Of the primitive Shiva temple.
They cut her fingers, lips, ears, eyelids
Devoured them in festal hunger.
Seeing this
My unmarried sisters turned corpses
I collected their torsos
In a large towel,
Washed them in the holy spring waters
Packed neatly in my college rucksack.
They again came back
There were no children, no wives, no food
But they insisted on eating.
In disgust, I offered them
Cold and sticky pizzeria pieces of my mother’s tongue
And preferred to become a martyr without a language.
← Ashwani Kumar