Two Poems

Abstract

30 WLT NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2016 Two Poems by Meena Alexander Fragments of an Inexistent Whole Inspired by Alison Knowles’s “A House of Dust” 1. Syllables sieved through floating gates, Metal clack of printer Mortal rendition, Fortran – The future coming closer and closer House of broken dishes / by the sea / using electricity Black flash, strange as any me I might claim The already gone, its music barely audible 00-111 – 000 cut and sizzling, swiveling repetitions The mind falling from itself, into no where. The desire for place not to be denied What touch affords us, sempiternal hold. 2. Imagine a woman with a veil over her head, Black cotton or muslin Of the sort that my grandmother wore, the edge of her sari As she sat under the sun, by the well side. Already the veil covers the garden Mango trees split into the shape of harps. 3. The artist decides on materials, timber, tar, tumbleweed, Then light source – natural, electric, strobe, that sort of thing She decides on location – A bracelet, a brandishing of space Scores for a masked ball, the self and its others Clinging close, hips grinding, a distinct congress Precise rendering of rhyme or its uncoupling Underwater copulation = syllabic sense. The artist decides on persons – girls with jump ropes Boys whistling in the sunlight by hydrants gushing Hot metals, the planet soaked in ether, A scholar blinded by footnotes, scores of them, Men and women, faceless now, joyful and inconsolable Veritable census of the dead. 4. House of Dust / on open ground / lit by natural light Is that where I belong? Lord have mercy! Grandmother cried, when I was born This child will wander all her life. Grandfather tossed in a match The bush filled with smoke, gooseberry bush – With freckled leaves – Tat tvam asi – The deliverance of Sanskrit What I learnt without knowing that I did, Grammar of redemption Sucked from fiery space As grandmother’s hands turn to dirt The sky – cerulean blue Sheer aftermath. poetry WORLDLIT.ORG 31 alexander photo : mona aipperspach Death of a Young Dalit In memory of Rohith Vemula (1989–2016) Trees are hoisted by their own shadows Air pours in from the north, cold air, stacks of it The room is struck into a green fever Stained bed, book, scratched windowpane. A twenty-six-year-old man, plump boy face Sets pen to paper – My birth Is my fatal accident, I can never recover From my childhood loneliness. Dark body once cupped in a mother’s arms Now in a house of dust. Not cipher, not scheme For others to throttle and parse (Those hucksters and swindlers, Purveyors of hot hate, casting him out). Seeing stardust, throat first, he leapt Then hung spread-eagled in air: The trees of January bore witness. Did he hear the chirp From a billion light years away, Perpetual disturbance at the core? There is a door each soul must go through, A swinging door – I have seven months of my fellowship, One lakh and seventy thousand Please see to it that my family is paid that. She comes to him, girl in a cotton sari, Holding out both her hands. Once she loosened her blouse for him In a garden of milk and sweat, Where all who are born go down into dark, Where the arnica, star flower no one planted Thrives, so too the wild rose and heliotrope. Her scrap of blue puckers and soars into a flag As he rappels down the rock face Into our lives, We who dare to call him by his name – Giddy spirit become Fire that consumes things both dry and moist, Ruined wall, grass, river stone, Thrusts free the winter trees From their own crookedness, strikes Us from the fierce compact of silence, Igniting red roots, riotous tongues. On Writing “Death of a Young Dalit” When I was twenty-four I lived in Hyderabad. There was a neem tree in the garden of the Golden Threshold, once the home of the poet Sarojini Naidu, then the site of the new Central University. When time permitted I would sit in the shade of that tree, shut my eyes, and dream. Then, as now, images came...