Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
With the pagan poets you’ll find me, where else
but in a purgatory dawned at the Ganga with Libra
on the rise. So scour, if you like, the face for the tells
of eternal lassitude: the turning tetrahedrons
in the eyes¾one pair of upright faces to absorb the black,
a second to spit fire back at the sun, and a third the zebra
patterns of dreamed-in sleep—and the nose aquiline, intact
but humped, fit for villains or emperors or exiles, the lips with
a creeping silver camouflage of hair, and on the sack
of the jowl as well, a walk to the end. No one skips that—
and moreover the terrain is always uneven—
as when the Pandavas crossed a massive peak
a vaster desert eclipsed it,
when, further, on leveled terraces in tacit agreement
with the ascent of the cloud-gathering slope
each, one by one, dropped, prey to their vanities.
Thus Bhima’s bereavement
that fell first on Draupadi, she, great dark-skinned Hope
as living ember, who had done no wrong save her partiality
to one among them; then Nakula and Sahadeva, after they’d groped
to the climb’s next level, simply
in result of the childlike pride they’d held in
their wisdom and in the beauty of their souls;
then cruelly, consecutively,
Arjuna, for his pride in having been a hero of the epic;
then spelled in
the last letter of the slope, Bhima himself, perplexed,
picture of goodness and loyalty, feared paladin,
only because he’d loved to eat. Then only vexed
Yudhishthra and the stray dog who’d followed him,
that hapless being
who was not renounced even by the one who’d
renounced all, indexed
in the final pages of the land. Hearing and seeing
would come to join at that margin, but before that there was
more than time enough
for a world to take full stock of its own engineering,
for the pause to appear in notation, the smoothness be found in the rough.
← Vivek Narayanan