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 brings the rains to scorching Delhi, even
before she lands. The skies wear cigarette ash,
goats bleat, winds create funnels with the sand,
and even green leaves break-up with branches.
In her city,
she was the famous beauty. Men
stumbled when she walked,
women asked her what she ate, what she
applied on her skin, marvelling
at her elephant-apple rinsed silky hair; but
she had no secrets to share, and
refused to tell them her sorrows.
Years later, unable to leave the bed for months,
on her way to a faraway hospital before
the days of cheap long distance calls,
my father bought her a notebook.
Write, he said. For yourself, for your son,
Otherwise how will he know?
How will he know about
your Muslim lover who was beaten up by your brothers
for loving you, about the poet who wrote a new poem
every night on a different classroom desk
until there were none
left to pour out his heart, the geek who made you the protagonists
of his fiction but didn’t write reply poems like me?
How will he know about your empty stomachs,
the mustard oil you applied on your face, the
bitter juice you drank every morning for that
golden skin, that men could kill for? Sit up
write that you slept on beds from where you
could count the stars, that rains meant placing
tumblers on strategic spots of the house, and staying awake
with a mop made of old bedsheets. Write about
Rebellions and oil blockades, about
farmers who rushed to the streets of Hamdoi
to kill landlords. Spend the ink
if not for yourself, for your first born,
who you worried wouldn’t have a sharp nose
like his maternal uncles,
for you married low,
for love, for ideals, for protest marches
and poetry.
Aruni Kashyap is a writer and translator. He is the author of the novel The House With a Thousand Stories (Viking, 2013) : set against a series of widespread extra-judicial killings conducted by the Indian government during the late nineties to curb an armed insurgency in the Indian state of Assam. He has also translated from Assamese and introduced celebrated Indian writer Indira Goswami’s last work of fiction, The Bronze Sword of Thengphakhri Tehsildar, for Zubaan Books (2013). He won the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh in 2009. His short stories, poems and essays have appeared or forthcoming in The Oxford Anthology of Writings from Northeast, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, the Hindu, Evergreen Review, Karthika Review, Juked, Sin Fronteras Journal, Stonecoast Review, The Atticus Review, and others. He is an Assistant Professor Creative Writing at University of Georgia, Athens.
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