Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Amma, the dignity with which you carry yourself
perplexes me, your setting a moral pluriverse right with
each decision each parry each darting
forestalling glance forward
Mother, the four of us exchange our energies
in the face of multitudinous atrocities you calmly refuse
to believe in evil Mama the world
and its phenomena do not
concern you but yet Mummy how I admire
and am muddled by the manner your
yoking of pride and diffidence
in single being in
appearing aloof not out of snobbery
but rather at necessary times in the wait
of something authentic festering
unsaid Ah Ma you ruined
me you stung me with your insistence
in stern face on the true and it frightening
in the kitchen that nameless afternoon
the four-cornered door opened on the back yard
and I looking out there that endless yellow grass
asking but O Mata can’t I tell a lie what can
happen who can do what to me if I do
can’t a lie show as well a lie as faint
as the grass is long as tiny as brief
as the bee that stung my eye that mashes
the hurt to make this yard like all the yards can’t
I can’t I tell one just like walking like the first day you let
me run out there and play
by myself one not wrong but only a kind of carriage
to end all lies in the paternal play of the sky for
we know well I can confidently say now
though I didn’t then that the lie
in truth precedes the truth and you
stiffened and said in the certainty of
your forestalling code No no kanna no no
matter what you must never
never tell a lie and I could not forget
you saying that just as I cannot
forget my not looking at you but
rather at that open door and the vista
that called to me unending Moder how even now
I want never to be like you and even
now I want exactly to be like you
and I am exactly like you and
the sunlight leaves and not
a shadow moves and I ask of the world
its immovable stones not least
in search of an independent
incorruptible authority well which
is it must I am I like her or un-
like her but not even an echo
returns to answer nor faith
arrives to anchor yet Mamma I love
how you carry yourself like a head of state and
although the seven oceans and the four
continents still sing your desperate
praise you are calm appear unconcerned even
if you are worried for me and by extension
for all of humanity and though Aayi love
is intense and troubled in all the every
language born from it one could
argue for S’s mother’s son’s sake that thaayi
paasam as it appears in the Tamil tongue
is most intense and troubled of all even to
the very point of murder yes but
Mamma let me underline nevertheless
I myself have no intentions whatsoever
of killing you rather it embarrasses me
to write these words that is to size
myself in order that they be written for
despite what you once said about
your own writing which remained
hidden from me those years
even as clearly it was somehow carried
and quartered into me as insuppressible inexplicable
aspiration and when I understood where it was
things do come from and where they sometimes lead
you told me how endings were such
a problem that you Maman were tempted to finish
each tale of yours by simply killing the central
character since that ease of exit does in theory exist
even as nothing can really be that easy in
there for the equivalent reason that it
is not so simple out here and in fact
utterly forestalling the apparent gap
between our worlds is that they
are not worlds at all except in a manner
of speech and perhaps the greatest
secret both unpleasant and
not is not that death is continually near
us which fine it is but rather Mom
that things which are both the particular
plastic buckets and swollen ankles and not
are unable to end and they like little dustmote
variant patterns must will persist resist persist
Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach and Life and Times of Mr S. He is Co-editor of Almost Island. Padma Narayanan is the translator of many works of literary fiction from the Tamil, including books by the authors Imayam, Aadhavan, La. Sa. Ramamritham and Indira Parthasarathy. Her translations have appeared online at Words Without Borders, Agni and elsewhere. Vivek and Padma have recently collaborated on a translation of the poems of Kutti Revathi.
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