Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
He hasn’t got anything done today,
he’s in a daze at this dust-and-amber moment.
His eyes smart at the surface glaze of the blueprints, paper
crackling like parchment or a shoulder shorn away.
At his office window twilight through the dust
as he adjusts his lamp and re-adjusts it,
the lamp-light angles in on blueprints,
he skips over quotations from professional tree-fellers
(we don’t call them lumberjacks here)
but each time he eyes them
he hears the sliced echo of a whine from an electric saw.
He pats his pay cheque.
His boss who has bought this sprawling acreage
of wetlands has hired attorneys, a black-gowned wall
against unknown forest laws.
‘The lawyering will take care of the courts for years,’ he laughs
a Cuban cigar barrelling out of his mouth.
He loves the wetlands, squelch and suck of mud-ooze,
shrike and marsh harrier, black drongo and speckled eagle owl,
waters filmed with algae,
a heron undecided where to land—
on algae, or water or strips of land within the water?
He remembers the shoots as a young boy with his father,
remembers how his father put his hand on the barrel
and lowered his gun
when a blue bull exploded from a clump
of thorns and saw-grass; remembers how they spotted pug marks
and backtracked, and the feral unease of the moment.
At night his imagination would reel in films—
rhinos sloshing in water, wild dogs loping in.
Memory sultry with nostalgia one has to lay off.
Now his job is to build a township here,
no trouble at the office, which he locks up and drives home.
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