Image of Untitled by Amr Fahed
E.V.Ramakrishnan
Prelude
In the isolation of our homes, we wait for messages from prophets and oracles. They bring no relief. Our memories slip away in the panic of the present. The personal past sinks into a heap of waste which is emptied with the trash cans. Fragments from the personal past resurface against the wreckage of the present. A quoted line creates an inter-text, builds a bridge with the past. A momentary experience of transcendence holds out the promise of com-passion. You are rendered speechless, stamped with red, marked for God knows where. You are being transported out of history with no forwarding address.
**
Unlock Your World
Unlock your world and let me in,
Said the song.
I was unprepared for what followed.
A blur of hair and hands,
With every beat you vanished
Into yet another fold of the widening ring.
Radha is never there,
But the song says, here she is,
And there she was.
Holding the world together for an instant
To scatter it next into a whirl of shapes
Melting Into hereness and thereness.
And I was the in-between-ness trying for
A foothold in the song.
“Cherish all things red, my love, for the season
Is tinged with red”.
Waters parted and I had
A glimpse of you: you were a figure in red stone,
Water cascading all over.
You were more water than stone, as the rapids
Of music plunged
Into the depths of night.
“Coral is the glow on Radha’s
Smile and scarlet the bangles on her hands”.
A cyclone makes a landfall,
A minaret crashes into sand.
I could see where I was headed
That night, a tranquillized beast
Being carried into a cage.
An out-law on the out-skirts of your village,
I wait for the next summons:
A blast of fury from your gyrating anklets,
A slope of music from where the world is within reach.
__________________
Note: The following lines are my translations of a few lines from a poem by Narasinh Mehta:
“Cherish all things red, my love, for the season is tinged with red” and “Coral is the glow on Radha’s smile, and scarlet the bangles on her hands.”
–0—
We may still have a past
We may still have a past
and its ways of knowing,
words unsteady on censored
meanings. Flamingoes
will remain just that –
a rumour from a faraway creek.
A sense of mystery will
linger – a murmuration
typesetting the sky in archaic
fonts and demotic speech:
stories wood-cut from burning-ghats
told and retold into a holy-book
by pall-bearers, street-vendors,
bread-bakers, palm-readers,
fire-eaters, house-breakers,
honey-hunters, bone-setters,
bar-hoppers and pawn-brokers
in which everyone has a page
where words face in all directions
a house with no walls
a no-man’s land without shadows
an elsewhere of silence
for late-comers, long-lost brothers,
compulsive litigants,
parodists who were priests once,
and poets who think
we may still have a past.
—0—
The Man with a Goat
A shudder runs through the crowd.
Will they take off our turbans?
The magic deer in frescoes is framed
in a downpour of mist and fire. An arrow
trails the beast into its next birth.
He names trees and birds
after the copper-faced and the wind-blasted,
those who have gone missing.
Retells the yarn of the road
into never-ending rhymes.
The man with a goat exceeds the proforma
by a litany of floods and droughts.
They take off his turban, stamp
The forehead, but do not notice the goat.
I am safe as long as no one
notices the goat, he says to himself.
You are lucky to have no turban, he tells the goat.
The goat nods in agreement.
Yielding land to water
Burnt soil to sky
Silt and surge of memory to displaced dialects
The body begins to exhale to its roots of beginnings.
******
Note The cover image is a work by Syrian artist Amr Fahed who lives in Damascus, Syria. His work can be seen here: https://en.syriaartasso.com/artists/amr-fahed/ -----------
E.V.Ramakrishnan is a bilingual writer who has published poetry, criticism and translations in Malayalam and English. He has four books of poetry in English: Being Elsewhere in Myself (1980), A Python in a Snake Park (1994), Terms of Seeing: New and Selected Poems (2006) and Tips for Living in an Expanding Universe (2018). He has edited an anthology of modern Indian poetry, The Tree of Tongues (1999) and a volume of translations from the poetry of K.G.Sankara Pillai, Trees of Kochi and Other Poems. He has seven books of criticism in Malayalam and four critical works in English, besides twelve volumes of edited works. After retiring as Professor and Dean from Central University of Gujarat, he divides his time between his home town, Payyanur in Kerala and Gandhinagar in Gujarat.
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