The shadow of my
memory
An unreliable shadow of memory”- Italo
Calvino (Tr: William Weaver )
am the poet, fixing images
From
the abyss of time
Into
the canvas of the past
Where
Myth and History are miscible
With
the precision and swiftness of
A
fork-tongued cobra strike.
To
retrieve my memory;
I
tame an eagle with my lyrics.
When sung
with my blood-red tongue
The
eagle glides over my landscape
Scanning
for rivulets of my bloodstream
Veering off
my footprint trail.
I
grip the aerial roots
Of
a banyan tree
With
my palm, l envisage
An
oral lyric swaying
With
the winds of the time.
After
being scripted into
The
soil, roots seek architecture
With
breathing space for all
Where
I inhale an anti-clockwise birth.
In
the preordained
Aural ellipse of a prophecy
I
retrieve myself.
A six yard single-string
musical instrument
unveils in a layered veil
the curve of her spine
gyrating along an aural ellipse
draping her in seasons.
Her perfect pleats dissolve
into imperfect stillness
The silence of her midriff
has seven ripples.
3. THE HISTORIAN’S
AUTOPSY OF A TREE
“Kill, you may kill, sell, you may sell”
— (Slave Transaction Document)
After “How to pick a hanging tree”? by Kwame Dawes
*
The roots must be strong near the base,
Then it is unlikely that the trunk will be usurped
By the push and shove of a slave.
“A mushroom that grows on the bark has no deep soil.
This tree was chopped down
With an axe, with its handle
Axed from the same tree.
*
The soil surrounding the base
Like the saucer of a tea-cup
Has to be wide and deep enough
For the corpse to be covered.
Further excavations might unearth a trite semi-rusted tale
Could crumble into pieces unless handled with care.
*
The leaves of such trees are greener
Lush green, the nourishment from corpses.
This shade of green is abundant in “God’s own country”.
4. MY LANGUAGE
The language we speak now,
Once had no fences;
Aggravated trespassing
Has rendered it barren.
At the frontiers of my
language
Deployed with an insidious
intent
Is a domesticated erstwhile
stray-dog
With its bark worse than its
bite;
But carefully tethered to harm
no one.
If you frequent my tongue
The rust on your
tongue-cleaner
Can cause tetanus to your
soul.
Introducing an alien tongue in
elementary schools
Is like building dams on
rivers
Too close to their origins.
The river will be sedated for
eternity.
Bitter neem-pas
Smeared
around my
Birth-mother’s
nipples
To wean
me away from my vernacular-
For me to
go and kiss the world.
Our minds
like beddings with synthetic bed spread
Love
betraying us like
My muse
calling out the name of her ex-lover in ecstasy.
It
requires an inter-generational
Surgical
procedure
To remove
white man’s bullets
From the
spine of my book of poems.
In the autobiography of my vernacular
There were a few suicide notes
Transliterated with an
indelible ink
Like the legacy of slave
owners
Passed on to the hardbound of
my poetry book
-once a stepping pedestal for
imperial boots.
My language
Was a tax-free transit point
At one of the world’s shores
Like the Cape of Good Hope.
Now, story of man
Snores in my language.
On Inter-Cast
Just like the saying goes-
Tongue has no bones
But can break many,
The submissive tuft of hair on the shaved
Heads of the twice born
Command an army of henchmen
Guarding the rust
Of medieval fences built
Along caste hymens.
(c) Chandramohan S
————————————-
Kiss of Love
“Correct our watches by the public clocks.
Then sit for half an hour and drink our bocks”
T.S. Eliot Portrait of a Lady
Two pairs of lips
lock in a kiss
losing the sense of time.
Heads turn to
adjust wrist watches
from a public clock.
Locked lips
turn the wheel of time
like prophets.
The Oral Lyric of Life
Every river in my land
Is a pulsating relic of an
Epic outliving its time.
The river is like a verse
Drawing its breath from
Myriad recitations in cohesion.
(Eye witnesses
Narrating the same event
To weave a single fluid visual)
A single unbroken stream of life
Like the spine of my body.
This river outflows its course
Like stories outliving names
At cemetery tombstones.
The dialects drift apart
Marooning a story on
The inland of Pangaea.
It is a shipwreck story
With no survivors.