Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
“but a moral sense
is exhausting I am exhausted a coma looks good to me”
—Ellen Bryant Voigt
the angels never arrived but mother slept on the floor
so my tiny body could rock the crib back and forth between delirious
and delicious akin to the sensuous nodding of a bare shoulder
unnamed sequin slipping on a collar bone’s cliff stirring gallons of youth
running industry of bedtime scum tears so mucky always an exercise of respite
what a shame horrors of the last war understood
only when the next war was here
centuries ago the prince of the erstwhile kingdom I was born in
his initials SCB embossed in the name of my high school is said to have melted
into light when an accidental bullet from his hunting buddy’s gun
deep in a forest’s leafed heart cleaved his ribs how do you explain accident
heels on banana peels the expression of recessive genes scooter skidding
on a hump I broke my face once you broke your heart once we all vanished
briefly
into a light princely
in 1984 like now bullets the preferred medium of communication
a country’s liver a prime minister’s body even a bullet seeks home
do the makers of bullets ever imagine their destinations or is it just another
job to birth cylinders of blistering light one day sounding the crack
of doomed bone in 1984 my grandfather too died of a strange illness doctors
didn’t have a diagnosis for everyone says I look like him
through a night of dread I stare at his portrait garlanded in molding
marigold like an animal in the zoo stares at a kind visitor
I touch his cheekbones then mine the resonance between faces galaxies apart
deeper than I imagined the morning after
in stale fear I try new ways to commit old mistakes
for in the urgency of recurrence lay the strange high of incantation after a breath
a blink a quick think how my ancestors passed their bones like batons
in a relay race how they must have muscled on to the brown mountains they are
now buried under the sleepwalking synonym
for memory is desire an egg cracks to mother its own yolk
eggshell relics a common feature
of underworld museums during the tsunami floods broke metal
into colossal foam soon I ran away from home
to join a band of men scraping the shore for shells the sand on our tongues
gave our songs the texture of stars years later it beggars belief my semi-
translucent enamel glosses sinister waters on moonlit nights