Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Like Yudhishtra and his dog for paradise
first dragged through a hell where enemies
had been given time to rejoice
in their misdeeds or Dante gone to where Beatrice frees
him only after the descending circles
had penetrated earth’s core and the breeze
of a limbo that combed and made continual ripples
in the emanations of beating heart,
sequence is the key to heaven’s scruples:
sequence is what I’ve taken apart
to know the movement of these bodies
with the indifference of their own light in the dark.
That which occurs here tarries
elsewhere, and that which does not occur occurs
nowhere else. Threw myself in flurries
to search for “eternal calm”. Bore the worst
indignities. Faith is that thing born from hope and
the fiercest, cruelest imagination. There in the pursed
light, evolving, nucleosynthetic, had an opened
start so complete every single star
was a name. Token
of gratitude, the rush, the far-
-thest sheen of names, and the name of the holy river
too, in celestial run. Avatar
of the historical arts, of grammar
and of the observant husbanded sciences
with the perfection of a poem but not its fatal tremor.
Then the end of all thought was also the coming of alliances
and the arrogant day-maker was no longer the sun,
the night’s shepherd no longer the moon in all its glances.
Touch was the limit of theory, and theory and touch were one.
← Vivek Narayanan