Émigré by Jose Varghese

Émigré
~ © Jose Varghese

No one ever asks why your home
failed to contain you. They assume
you’ve just grown out of it. But
the signs are too clear now - you
lose the bliss of belonging anywhere
once home kicks you out.

But you smile, and never speak
of the swaying ways doors
locked you out, eyes showed you
the way away, mouths shut tight
in frowns, as you tread
indifference, to find a way out.

Only a guava tree in your courtyard
tried to stop you with a thud
of an over-ripe fruit falling down,
breaking open, its red flesh
a wound that would never heal.

But you couldn’t stop the words
that formed you, the thoughts that
made you grow - each, a leap of faith.
You heard footsteps in the dark
coming to hunt them down.

You went away, aimless,
escaped to endless wandering,
spent a lifetime
seeing guava in persimmon,
tasting the bliss of being nothing.

One day a pavement vendor,
the next an office clerk in stiff shirt,
and then, when you make the mark,
a character full of depth - someone
who could be played by Sydney Poitier,
or Denzel Washington; and then, a speck
of dirt in a street, a being of nothing.

They celebrate
your wronged, diminished life.
They envy the power of your scars,
long for your perpetual loneliness,
fight for the ground that
doesn’t exist beneath your feet.

('Luminous Echoes' anthology, Dublin: 2016)

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

One Art BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” from The Complete Poems 1926-1979. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted with the permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC.

HYSTERIA by Sujatha Mathai

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Yes, for centuries we've 

been mute.
Not that we're dumb, or our
tongues had been cut out. Not
quite. We could prattle alright:
about recipes, about dust,
about our neighbour's daughter,
about our clothes, secrets about
how to stay beautiful, how to
stay young. We knew nursery
rhymes which we lisped to our
children, but never the dark
interiors of those stories, those
lay shrouded in sleep like the
Sleeping Beauty. Yes, we were
sleeping beauties, baby dolls,
we slept while our children
were branded with seals of ownership,
our names taken from us, we smiled
while others filled in forms for us,
others made laws which ruled our
lives.
Yes. We were dumb,
except when we cried, which
was often; when we were ravished
as young girls, by strange, brutal men,
when we bore children, and delivered
them
in the agony of childbirth. When our
husbands
our fathers, our brothers and our sons,
and even our lovers, if we dared have
them,
struck us and betrayed us,
and sold us and wounded us.
We dreamed of gentle hands and
loving words,
for were we not the soil filled with
the ache
of longing for the seed, but instead we
were
coarsely used, our bodies brutalised,
our souls numbed.
And even our mothers denied us.
In the hour of darkness, they
cut off our hair, shaved our heads,
burnt us on the funeral pyre,
burnt us in our homes.
Our brothers inherited the earth.
We were disinherited of even our
smallest
shreds of humanity, the day we were
born.
Our parents cursed us. They educated
our brothers, gave them the land
and the houses, and the future,
and the power and the glory.
We were married off, we were mere
pieces of property, passed from one
family
to another, to work and bear children,
or. if we didn't bear children,
to be cursed for our barenneas.
No one looked into our eyes with love.
If they had, they'd have heard our souls
talk.
Instead, all they said was
She's hysterical. Women are like that,
especially when they menstruate,
especially
when they stop menstruating,
especially as they approach death.

*****

Copyright. Anna Sujatha Mathai
(First pub in Life - on my Side of the Street.
Sahitya Akademi. 2005.)

The Silence of the Stars by David Wagoner

When Laurens van der Post one night
In the Kalahari Desert told the Bushmen
He couldn't hear the stars
Singing, they didn't believe him. They looked at him,
half-smiling. They examined his face
To see whether he was joking
Or deceiving them. Then two of those small men
Who plant nothing, who have almost
Nothing to hunt, who live
On almost nothing, and with no one
But themselves, led him away
From the crackling thorn-scrub fire
And stood with him under the night sky
And listened. One of them whispered,
Do you not hear them now?
And van der Post listened, not wanting
To disbelieve, but had to answer,
No. They walked him slowly
Like a sick man to the small dim
Circle of firelight and told him
They were terribly sorry,
And he felt even sorrier
For himself and blamed his ancestors
For their strange loss of hearing,
Which was his loss now. On some clear night
When nearby houses have turned off their visions,
When the traffic dwindles, when through streets
Are between sirens and the jets overhead
Are between crossings, when the wind
Is hanging fire in the fir trees,
And the long-eared owl in the neighboring grove
Between calls is regarding his own darkness,
I look at the stars again as I first did
To school myself in the names of constellations
And remember my first sense of their terrible distance,
I can still hear what I thought
At the edge of silence were the inside jokes
Of my heartbeat, my arterial traffic,
The C above high C of my inner ear, myself
Tunelessly humming, but now I know what they are:
My fair share of the music of the spheres
And clusters of ripening stars,
Of the songs from the throats of the old gods
Still tending ever tone-deaf creatures
Through their exiles in the desert.

Excerpt from 'Cruelty' by Namdeo Dhasal, the Dalit Poet

I am a venereal sore in the private part of language.


The living spirit looking out


of hundreds of thousands of sad, pitiful eyes


Has shaken me. I am broken by the revolt exploding inside me.


There's no moonlight anywhere;


There's no water anywhere.


A rabid fox is tearing off my flesh with its teeth;


And a terrible venom-like cruelty


Spreads out from my monkey-bone


....

KEEPING QUIET by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fisherman in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.