ABOUT THE POEMS One of the more restless and wide-ranging sensibilities in contemporary Indian poetry appears on these pages this month in two incarnations. The first is the traveller, leaving verse footprints upon secular and sacred landscapes in China. The second, in 'monsoon nocturn', is the singer of the dirge that mourns and memorialises the passing away of a loved one, in this case the poet’s mother. Showing us this figure more voice than body, meditating upon “the squirming/shimmer of creation” and leaving behind an argument reverberating in the world, the poet manages to interweave cosmic time with generational time, the mysterious luck and patterning not just of life but of lineage. In Sarukkai Chabria’s vision the unusual verb “grains”, flitting like a weaver’s shuttle between rain, light, and time, suggests both the interplay of the world’s elements and dimensions with one another and the marks of human presence rippling across other bodies, other minds.
Spring in Beijing’s business district
Acres of glittering glass
towers tell the global tale
of power and anonymity.
On clean pavements, specificity:
slender magnolia trees
endowed with the ageless
asymmetry of spring efflorescence
stand bare but for buds
in pink and white. Nothing stirs.
Here primordial familiarity doesn’t
reinforce the power
of possible transcendence but
reverses it. Nature turns synthetic
and scentless; the heart relates
to man-made monstrosities.
Mosque (c. 700), Xian
Lacquered in late afternoon light
the ancient mosque constellates
as a sacred chameleon sourced
from mingled memory: toorki/
chini. The old desert dreams
of water surface as turquoise
tiles; the surge of the Dragon
sheens its winged roof of glaze.
Here peace emanates
through the proportions
of courtyards, clipped shrubs,
stippled carp in stone basins, fallen
light and carved calligraphy
in lapis lazuli: Allah hu akbar
The muezzin’s call is inflected
in Mandarin. Here the hunting heart
quells its hungers: the unfamiliar
is welcomed home through beauty.
monsoon nocturn
i.m. saroja kamakshi
1
neti, neti:
not this, not that either—
is an inadequate
definition of the primal
being she said, the squirming
shimmer of creation
adrift in the cosmos
can’t be contained thus
nor the refulgence
beyond—
so abolish
oppositions, negate
negations, she said,
instead affirm, expand
the concept of the first
cause, come on, conceive
neti, neti
as: not only this, not only that either –
a single word
can birth universes
don’t you see?
(inclusiveness
was her unyielding
oyster,
her singularity)
reflecting
i walk alone
through puddles of sky
2
rain grains light
— as tumbling sparkle —
as light grains time
— as a bath of polished slide, as
dawn’s rain-shot sheen, as
tube-lit shine on soused shadows —
around us:
around us
the gift of graininess
grants presence
to the falling and
textures the ineffable
i remember her
through a gap
in rain
in snapshots
of time diffused
by grains of memory, by
the slow burnish
of living
that whets
forgetting
but the implacable
rules of radiance
demand their price:
for burnish,
sparkle, polish,
sheen and shine
to emerge
and light
our being
grains of our substance
must first be scoured
and lost
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