Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
My mother was a woman made
Entirely out of vowels,
In the evenings when the house was
Shut, rooms – dead cities of consonants,
She’d go from door to door knocking.
Collecting our broken sounds
And forming them into sentences,
Connecting our joy, boredom and pain,
Our snores, our sobs, our giggles and sighs
And the thuds of objects falling.
Our laughter, tragedy, fears and sins
Soaked into her nautilus skin,
Her lotus heart ate up our screams –
Even our nightmares and our dreams
Found their beds inside her ears.
She went around the house gathering
The split music of our existence.
It found resolve inside her flesh
Like monsoon’s thunder and lightning
Finds its resolve in a single tree.
Even the house, the walls spoke to her,
Of the silence between our spaces
And mirrors that never shared faces,
Spoke of the scattering of our souls
Through mumbling floors
And creaks of doors.
And at night she entwined our voices
Into one water’s conversation
And ascended it to heaven
In the glass vapors of prayers,
Making light our days of lead.
My mother was a vowel woman,
The mover of our stones and souls.
We spoke to each other and to God
Through the window of her shaman heart
That spoke so little of itself.
I do not know of heaven’s replies
But the garden gave her answers,
It called to her and fixed her eyes.
The green gatherings of birds on trees
Fed her faith, her thirst for harmony.
The first act of speech is silence,
To stop and listen to the sounds
Already swimming around us.
We stand deaf to paradise
If we do not give an ear to earth.