Perhaps The World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

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The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

From The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo. Copyright © 1994 by Joy Harjo. 

TH R E E P O E M S O F H O P E by K. Satchidanandan

 

awaited your cupped hands
to stop ther fall midway!
Don’t you hear the sea whisper,
debts are not to be repaid?
Even your dark little room
has a piece of sky.
Everything is blessed:
fish,cicadas,sedges,
sunlight,lips,words.

AT TIMES

At times it is good to laugh,
Even the moment before
you take your life,for,
the sun survives you;
fishermen still set their tiny boats
on the raging sea;
the drowned man’s clothes
learn to fly about on the riverbank;
a man and woman blossom
into heaven from the bed of misery;
a boy riding the noon
dreams of caparisoned elephants;
a girl breathes orange blossoms
and slowly turns into a breeze;
a homebound bird
deposits four blue eggs
and a star in the twilight;
on the lips of a happy drunk,
Saigal trembles like the moon in a river (1)
a poem slips past a banyan tree
hiding its face in an umbrella;
a raindrop turning into
an emerald on a colocasia leaf
remembers Kunhiraman Nair (2)

THOSE WHO GO

Let them go who want to;
turn your eye towards those
who remain.Look into the mirror:
an angel watches you from within,
whispering to you in your
own voice, ‘Live, live on’.

Listen to silence;
it is an uproar-
a cascade, like your beloved
bursting into laughter,
stroking her hair backward;
the dance of leaves;
the wind’s anklet;the song of survivors
from beyond the river; the new year
arriving with a round of claps,
and flowers hanging from its ears.

There is no yesterday,nor tomorrow;
only the doors of today opening
to the sky.And smells: wet hay,
grain boiling,rain-washed earth,
elanji,areca flowers,cardamom,
serpents’ eggs, the mysterious
secretions of trees and men.


I will not sleep tonight,
nor will I let you.

(Translated from Malayalam by the poet)

2003

(1)Saigal, a legendary Hindistani singer.
(2) P. Kunhiraman Nair, the famous Malayalam poet of Kerala’s vanishing
landscapes.

“Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

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

CommentShare

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.)