How Do Poets Write
How do poets write only of important things?
Could I? Of men touching me with
hands of sawdust and grease
you know the feeling;
of Syria, Lebanon, groves of blood and olives,
magenta streeted towns emptied of bodies
(and the bodies left are empty)
erupted architecture and
mourned empires soon to be forgotten.
I have banished the thought of their pets.
Shall I write of disease and all those
incurable things that one half of the world
believes could never happen to them.
What does one say about the ripe fanatics
surrounding us, so close now
we could even tango, we could
stick our tongues out and lick
the poison off the hairy ears of these
folk who wield their crafty tool tyranny.
Shall I waste ink on the zombie electorate
corpus of hate, serving the company of
outliers to the olden systems of love.
How men with beards are more likely
to disappear here even as these mega prized cities
slip violently to sea, a little more each year.
Let me write of the thing that stays
let me write of the unimportant moon.
The Privilege
I have been reckless with my girls
flimsy as chiffon skirts we have behaved
irreverent as petals falling, flipping up in the wind.
One, she was a sprite made of jazz and muscle but
even small men could capsize her with say
a cigarette, a poem, a punch in the face.
The other she was short, bum like
a temple dancer, decidedly atheist
pocket full of pot, a knife tongue of a girl, but still.
Soft as three gummi bears we would ride
through the Rape Capital of the World
drunk on freedom, taking lusty long man-less sips of it.
Cheap whiskey breath, stockinged legs I have
mostly lived immortal, but one night we are caught in fog.
Nature’s unexpected treachery binds us closer.
We go silent, peering, fear grips us by the vulva and
heat fizzes quickly out of scotch-bred throats as
a truck-beast looms up on a road name we don’t know.
We are frozen as ice cubes, till one of us decides to
roll down her window, lean out against headlight,
a loon facing doom, scooped crimson winter cloak
revealing neck, arched for death.
She says breathlessly, ‘Bhaiyya maachis hai?’
Everything pauses. He tosses down the box like fire from his loins,
at her, like he won. She lights up, a brown lock blows sex.
An ember guides us home.
Later I sleep between them, fuzzy as bunnies. I ask myself —
what saved us? Her beauty, the other one’s caste, the accent,
the big white car? I tuck guilt beneath the pillow
for every night I dream instead of die.
Becoming
You are not the sum of the people you have loved.
You are not the sum of the ones you have tried to,
nor the ones you didn’t but left your mark upon anyway.
Even in your wakeful, difficult, sizzling cruelty,
you are math more dignified than that.
You are not your favourite grey T-shirt or your
even now unquenched thirst for single malt.
You aren’t your first-grade teacher’s prophecy
from when you were filled with an abundance of hope,
nor are you your ninth-grade teacher’s warning,
from when you began to lose in bundles, the same.
But maybe you are your big smile. At least
that is how I would like to think of you. Your massive
heart might as well be secretly filled with forest flowers
coming up as merry pranksters in its mulchy groves.
And maybe, at least for me,
you are the sunrise splashed across the sky.
So brave in your bloodiness, forever rising even after sinking.
Fearlessly warm, transforming everything in your fiery wake.
Maybe, in the years no one was watching,
you unwrapped your litany of wounds,
drew time out like a ribbon to yourself,
and maybe just maybe, like a gift,
you became hope itself.
Excerpted from Where Stories Gather: Poems by Karuna Ezra Parikh (pp.114, Rs 399), with permission from HarperCollins India
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