Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
And deities fell out of my ears, climbed down my hair
Like jewel Rapunzels,
While I slept the sleep
Of scented daughters,
Dreaming the dreams of dawn,
On the twilight terraces
Of your secret garden.
Turning on my side,
Every time,
The summer breeze,
With careless curiosity undressed me a little more,
Prying into my prizes
Like waves explore the shore,
Uncovering from the sand, treasures and shells
With tidal hands.
Lady of beasts,
Lady of birds,
You whispered to winds
Caressing commands and made them
Charmed caravels
To carry your chants to my cognition,
Gliding over horizons that rose over my hips
And arriving
On the conquered island of my pale constitution.
Your winds found me, while I slept
And undressed me, while I dreamt
The dreams you sent them
To whisper to me.
I must have sweated through my skin,
The sweet sweat of dreams,
The memories of all my kin,
Family, lovers, friends,
They must have turned to iridescent pearls
On the grasses of your secret garden,
As I dreamt.
For I woke up with no faces and no names
Not even God
In my head, no, not a thing,
Not one of my kin,
My father who stared through smoke
And liked to talk of sin,
And my mother who went from room to room
Looking, for pens and pins.
My sister who slept through summers
With books on her bed,
And the elder sister who would never wear red
And the eldest who has long been dead.
I woke with none of them in my head,
Just your chants and your dreams;
I woke up,
An enchanted orphan,
Child of invisible gypsies.
And your emerald grass that held me, like fingers of the sea
Kissed my skin blind and red
Until there was no duality,
Between the holding and the held
And I was peach rock, a coral
Or a bed of flowers in you secret garden,
A convert to your charmed land.
Most beautiful of beckoners, you do not seduce,
Lady, you summon,
And to be summoned by you is to be swallowed by seasons
To which our souls are sedulous servants,
Soft in submission and silent surrender,
Without ever knowing why,
Never knowing who it is that summons us,
But we know it is you.
Crushed skies color your cheeks
And I dare not meet your eyes,
For there is the vanishing point,
That pulls me into another of your secret gardens.
For your eyes are eyes of odyssey,
And the gaze of your eyes is the gaze of gravity.
To look into them is to be overcome
By terrible toccatas that tear apart my already torn torso,
To be tortured by a thousand nights of terror,
It is to lose all sovereignty of one’s heartbeats,
Your gaze bestows upon my face
The blows of bewilderment,
I blush so hard I begin to bleed,
I wish to laugh mad as an earthquake,
And let out the moan of immaculate whores.
For to look upon you is to drink solar systems
And live through a million nights of pain and pleasure
To taste heaven and hell in eternal instances.
And on the boundary,
Where your lips meet,
One which is heaven and the other hell,
From there have been born
The names of all deities.
But whom shall I compare you to?
In your secret garden, everything is you!
Who should I ask to protect me
From the vision of your paralyzing face,
From whom can I ask for a reprieve,
A solace from your terrible beauty?
Who can I ask to save me from you?
When all saviors are born from your smiles.
To speak of God before you is blasphemy,
It is blasphemy to speak at all.
For to speak of God,
Is to say the name,
And all names sublimate in your presence.
Lady, you are the incinerator of names
And the owner of all names.
You are the eternally entertained,
All nouns and adjectives
Disintegrate in your secret garden.
Good and evil devour each other
Like snakes at your feet
And turn to flowers of mirrors.
I do not know whether to
Love or to fear you,
For both are one
In your presence,
Like two trees with tangled roots
I cannot tell the one from the other.
To fear is to desire to not be devoured
Yet I would not love anything more.
To love is to give of one’s self
But I fear I do not have
A self to give,
When I stand in front of you.
I wish above all,
Lady of beasts,
The wish to know you,
And for centuries to stare at you.
It is wrong to ask to be loved by you,
Maybe,
For love itself has been born
From your ivory hands,
How do you ask for water from the sea?
And love too,
Is first a word,
And all words vanish when one looks at you.