Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
She had left the house with a week’s change of
clothes and a dozen frozen meat patties. (You don’t
pack smart when you’re a land mass coming loose.)
Then she sent me to collect the rest of her stuff.
It was so hard climbing those familiar stairs now
that they were foreign territory.
I tried to sweep up all her things and stuff them
in the trunk of the car. An armful is an armful,
poor measure to apportion a lifetime’s spoils.
She held the ministry of memories. She was always
the caretaker of moments. The family pictures were
stacked neatly in albums, ordered by years. The
pictures were covered in a sheet of plastic as if
to ensure that the moments were kept air-tight,
sealed, so no instance of togetherness could
escape.
The stacks stuck together.
The moments came undone.
As I balanced one load in my arms, an album fell on
the ground, and a sealed symphony broke free. It
was that music trapped in boxes, when you open
them, a ballerina moves ever so slowly in a full
circle. It is the music of the stream of memories,
the tune of sealed bliss. It is the music of
happily ever after.
I heard it years later, it still jolted me how I
took it for some universal truth, and how it turned
out to be a mere prop.
Le temps est assassin et emporte avec lui le rire
des enfants.. mistral gagnant. (Time is a grim
reaper, it steals the laughter of children..)
The false music of eternity couldn’t hold together
the self that was coming undone. It gave a cadence
to the free fall, brought a rhythm to the breach
as you shatter on the inside.
I shattered, but I shattered rhythmically.
They were still together on that page – young, and
full of hope.
I want a lesson in courage from cartographers and
the cleaners of battlefields, they who tackle the
flux of frontiers, they who sweep the spoil of
battle, as the ‘sides’ keep changing.
I am unable to cut along the dotted lines memories
that are burnt into my veins.
I am unable to unthread the skein of moments that
is my skin.
I fail to nip and tuck the geography of the self.
How long before no mist of memories mars the
windswept battle sites?
How long before the earth is healed of the tremors
of continents breaking?
← Naima Rashid