}} THE HEART IS A BUNKER |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










THE HEART IS A BUNKER

I
Olive trees in a war-zone
 

In that room, we made
            a country,
life’s narrow strip
            in a war-zone.
You left for safer shores;
I died               right there,
in the middle of a scene,
where Darwish stood
reading
            ‘Under Siege’
in a theatre
            gutted by tanks
                         the next morning;
and the last olive trees
were being sawed off
            a farmer’s fading land.
I have swallowed the last
of a dream that was
you in me in you;
sometimes at night
            a clock freezes in the half-light
            of the moon
drawn out of your questions
like an answer on my body.
It’s a vanished country
            that is perfect,
round enactment
            of a strategy
where the cold march
of apology takes over
in the end;
the wind erects its
mausoleums of irony
and no one returns
to a place where
no one’s waiting.

II

Retreat

Late January.
Smog gathering night’s shadow
into an hour almost the heart of noon.
Children in gas-masks shuffle to school;
in their feet, the soft fall of a thousand black-birds
somewhere in Netherlands, last year.
The news of a friend, dying.
I try listening to prayers breathing as stones;
my tongue scavenges the air for a word,
hands grope at mudras of calm.
The marble Buddha at the altar
floats above the sea,
the meaning of it all.

A crack in the wall lets the sun in;
a precise half an hour
of dust and light for the bones.
Then, the dense drama of swift evening clouds;
somewhere near Hauz Khas, I almost open the car window
to a child selling rainbow-balloons in the traffic
before the signal goes green again after a difficult half an hour.
 

*

Air. The hyperbole of a lover
unable to heal from a betrayal that’s deepened
a shade too far in the head; each confusing turn
around those carefully planned blocks
is a geography of that face;
the spectre of pigeons caught up
in the hollows of a building’s heart.

It’s strange the way you’re always waiting
for a door to open somewhere and hold
the jagged edge of the city up against a blue sky;

for rain to steal beneath that door,
across the scatter of newspapers
and touch your tongue’s cramped feet
with the silence of the first word.
 
 
 
← Nabanita Kanungo