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The Poetry Issue 2023: This Rain That and other poems

The Poetry Issue 2023: This Rain That and other poems

This Rain That


this rain that patters through 
the night and drips 
all morning

from the eaves of age-soaked buildings
and lowered leaves of mango trees
along the street

was a glacier
recently

speed is just a little heat
applied with regularity

even now
see the sun that draws
a film of salt across your skin
quicken the stillness of your
continent within

from which 
entire sheaves of memory
the size and shape of cities
flake away into the current

maps of slights
topographies of trauma
coordinates of simple misery

shed like petals to
sweeten the thirsty ocean
of consistency 



Track & Field

—for Suguna Sridhar


a field without a
person is a field 
nonetheless

even sunk in water

but stoop to plunge a
shoot of rice into the mud 
and three simultaneous majesties 
take place inside the fluid 
cantilever of your frame:

imminence of soil
eminence of sun
immanence of effort

your arm as much the 
sprout you carry as 
the baton the sprinter 
her leg of a relay

could be a bouquet of angled light rays 
puts an image of you on 
the surface of the paddy

makes you think you
pick stalks up and 
set them down again

then night comes
and you lay out your mat

the runner is a wand
passed for an interim
around the track

grain raises grain 
into stacks


last crops sift the
next from their husks

we live delivered
on the one hand to
and on the other of 



Keido Fukushima’s Cup of Coffee


about

as soon as
we feel we have
built our house
on stable ground

another quake
another
great wave breaks the
sea gates down

again 



Special Relativity



put a ball on a hill
the ball rolls down

supposedly
that's gravity

make the hill a hole
the ball spins round
descending

day drops through you
like egg yolk into soup
sky a blue albumin

there's this charge to light
that might just be the
frequency of coffee

boxes full of empty 
bottles on the balcony
you excuse with the belief
you opened them to being

if there were prizes for denial
you'd be stiff competition

so far at one end of
your rope that you have 
no clue what the other 
is attached to

falling along
toward the heart 
of a fugitive star 



Corona I

—after Adil Jussawalla


eclipsed the mood
that put the world at
odds against you

birdsong takes the
whole bird
singing

holding nothing back
from lungs to the ends
of their feathers

beaks so wide the
morning fits there 
like a seed that needs this
consummation to be eaten

music taps the marrow
of grief and leaves
us light again

give to the king the
heavy head and wear
yourself the crown

These poems were part of The Poetry Issue 2023, curated by Shireen Quadri. © The Punch Magazine. No part of these should be reproduced anywhere without the prior permission of The Punch Magazine.   

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