January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Les Wicks has toured widely and seen publication across 11 countries in 7 languages. His 8th book of poetry is the Ambrosiacs (Island,2009).
http://leswicks.tripod.com/lw.htm
Boy Soldier
He talks about childhood
and prays for old age. There is no middle.
Ishmael Beah shot their feet and after a day of screams
shot their heads for the birdless quiet of evening.
Soldiers in the grasslands
reciting Shakespeare while they
snort brown-brown.
He was twelve.
We are all programmed to believe, a flaw
in the biology.
Our flaky hearts
on all those disappointing flags.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Heather Taylor Johnson moved from America to Adelaide in 1999. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide, is a poetry editor for Wet Ink magazine, and the author of the poetry collection Exit Wounds. She reviews poetry and other artforms for various publications. She has a husband, three children under six and a feisty pup, and finds the bathtub a welcome office space.
Shovelling Snow
There is subtlety in a morning snow
silent from the picture window and I’m curled cat-like
on my favourite couch, hot chocolate in my favourite mug,
warming my two morning hands, contemplating objects hidden
covered and coated with winter;
that lump that grew beneath her not yet forty skin.
Last night the phone call.
I spend the day in sweater and sweats and knitted socks
typing away at what I don’t know (death buried beneath the snow?)
because I want insight and closure
and most of the time I sit, staring at the foreign snow,
waiting to grow numb.
At three o’clock my computer rests,
a second cup of chocolate waits
while the hanging sun, timid, waits
to drop below the layered roofs
and the stewing of moose sausage waits,
the uncorking of the South Australian cab sav too
-because we wish to toast her in her own native flavour
and Canadian red wine lacks the complexity we are after.
If only I could find my couch and sit in the silence
of the late afternoon snow
but the driveway’s impatient now, covered and coated
with piles and hours of fresh white subtlety.
Christ but there is no subtlety in shovelling snow
and it does not dare to wait.
Tomorrow they will bury her in the dry, cracked
summer-drought soil, her not-yet forty years,
and as they comfort one another in their daylight despair
this house will be quiet with sleep,
not conscious of how we long for the sun.
The midnight will bring more snow and it will cover
my driveway once more, it will cover the tracks of our daily lives,
it will cover the warmth of the deep underground.
Spaces
I suggest something different from longing,
entirely separate from belonging.
I propose spaces.
Not holes or gaps
implying absence or worse
emptiness
but spaces as places
between what we know.
The big sky
my mother’s face
pizza sauce served thickly.
‘Awesome’ ‘cookie’ ‘garbage can’
my brother’s crooked eye.
SUVs and mountain streams
a bluebird’s song a hummingbird’s wing, tall glasses of 2% milk
my father’s towering body.
Vineyards
combustion heaters
saying ‘partner’ rather than ‘husband’
and sometimes stopping
to remember
he has an accent.
Port dolphins
gumtree sky
the footy the ocean
ubiquitous meat pies.
The space I am suggesting
between here and there
is not so big—
it’s enormous.
before noon
brick backyard
water bottle and phone:
or ‘my birthday poem’
The international dateline confuses calendars and friends
so yes, they all have an excuse.
Here’s to calling card expirations
and the baby’s almost due
and I didn’t get home until late last night,
and here’s to my forever forgiving simply just forgot
but you must know this:
that on this particularly sentimental day,
that here so far from the reaching Blue Ridge
I am waiting telephone on table
brick backyard.
This day is hot
like the summer tried to sneak away,
got caught red sweaty-handed
and spilled all over my body,
and on this day I wish the scent
of the ocean three kilometres away,
for my son to sleep a full two hours,
to tan myself bare
thinly layered sunscreened skin
wisteria my thick fortress.
Sweet family and those pictures of party hats
children with vague names
brown and green corduroy clothes
of the mid 70s we all seemed to wear,
remember this day
colour me into your latest photo
and stick it on the fridge.
Undomesticated university girls,
the river dudes with holey jeans,
my three-year tangle mistake
who shared my tiny bed,
our drinks were always raised to the camera’s lens,
so raise your drinks now, beyond your horizon;
it’s midnight your time
and I’m before noon water bottle ready.
I wish for the dj playing soul
to keep on spinning til the day is done
as I wish for accents like my own
because nothing speaks more of home
than an emphasized r at the end of my name,
the telephone and a strong memory
of an endlessly wooded grass backyard
and the reaching Blue Ridge in the distance.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
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Martin Edmond lives and writes in Sydney. His most recent book is The Supply Party: Ludwig Becker on the Burke & Wills Expedition
Three Lakes
My mind takes a holiday and my body, faithful and indissoluble accompanist, goes along for the ride. We circumambulate a sacred lake above which the mountain floats white on a white sky like something that cannot be yet is. Later I drive around another profaned by corpses from an ancient massacre; about the first we walk in perfect clarity, the second I round in a miasma of confusion and get lost: body and mind crying blindly out for soul. Had I forgotten there is a third in which all of our complexities are mired? It is like this in all the old places. New memories rise up with the alarm cries of birds and say: Go! Depart this place! Come here not as you are but as you were or would be! Nevermore! Etc. The bush fizzing with tui in the glory of the morning. Light glinting from the leaves and from the swift mirror of another lake, across which the once baleful cone now looks almost benign. As if the echo of catastrophe can only linger for so long before a sleepy domesticity of sun and shadow prevails; as if the days outlast the nights. There’s nobody here but me and the birds: paradise ducks honking as they swim out past the landing place. Black swans spreading their wings in alarm as they stagger clumsy through the mud to water’s edge then instantly transform to nonpareils of elegance and grace. Little blue ducks that were here last time I came as well. The wordless fascination of wordless things. That silence in which all other silences inhere. I can almost touch it—there, past the weir, past the raupo, past that greeny slope and past the sky. In the visitor’s centre the man from Tuhourangi is thinking of giving up his curatorial duties and going to Port Hedland to drive a road train. Port Hedlands, he says. Headlands maybe. Uncorrected. What is interred here laments still in his eyes. It is written on a plaque beside the road: They lay scattered in the deep night, the intense night; the sorrow and grief a tattoo of pain on my skin; and tears stream from my eyes for my dear departed ones. I show him the photo of the man I’m interested in. That’s one of my great great uncles, he says, but I don’t know much about him. And that little he does not say. Rewiri not Rawiri. Bare feet not boots as I had always thought. The quizzical look of one who has died and been reborn: we are not separate and distinct he says or seems to say. Mind body and soul: three lakes with one source. Turbulent or calm. Fathomless. Full of green bones. Or crayfish. Or the massive weedy trunks of trees. In those black depths you may drown. Fall through the earth all the way to China. Become engulfed in tendrils of fear, the terror of forgetting, that dreadful sink of longing. Although I wanted to I did not go through the dark doorway to the buried village. There was an ache in my soul as I drove away, bereft, unsatisfied: like a spirit hungering for blood so it can speak what it knows. And this was not some kind of possession from outside, this was me. Us. Mind body soul. Spirit. And then I knew we must go there again another time.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cassandra O’Loughlin is an Arts graduate from the University of Newcastle. Her poems have appeared in the Newcastle University Creative Writing anthologies, Southerly, Poetrix, Eureka Street and Catchfire Press publications. She won the Catchfire Press regional poetry prize in 2004
South of Birubi on Newcastle Bight
An evening breeze cools the hot sand
down by the shacks in Tin City
where a woman squats, scaling fish.
The iridescent scales are adding lustre
to her freckled, weathered skin.
The air smells of summer, salt,
the sea-spray is seasoning my tan,
and everything is tinged with fish-oil yellow
from the kerosene lamp and the crackling campfire.
Her grandfather built this shack
in the Depression.
It’s mullet-coloured, makeshift,
with a low-hipped lean-to
that drains rainwater into a fluted tank.
Potted gardens and pumpkins
stand as if in a dole-queue,
bleached and sun-hardened.
Beachwear pegged to a rope, is wind-filled
and ghost-dancing in the dunes’ creeping shadows.
All around are the vast and shifting sands,
arrested in the west by the Old Man
Banksia trees, bracken fern, mat rush and burrawang.
Small shrubs on the occasional knolls
look like old men dancing.
I tell the woman my grandfather is dead,
and I’m looking for his mate.
He’s dead too, she says. All the old ones are dead.
A mug of tea, offered at arm’s length, draws
a line in the sand between us.
She wipes the beautiful sequins from the worn blade,
as the ocean spills its long syllable
between the land and silence.
Then she scoops the prawns
from a bucket of brine
and drops them into the boiling pot.
They turn from slime green to salmon pink,
and I think:
nothing ever is as it seems.
The sun is shining
through the warp and weft of black velvet,
and a lifetime
is creeping up behind me
as if on stilts.
In the shadow of my hat
I watch the waves
rising as if behind glass,
suspending shoals of fish—
silver, catching the light.
I stride over the low-tide rooms,
periwinkle bathtubs, basins
and slap-stuck seaweed curtains.
My name is uttered
amid the litterinids: conniwinks and noddiwinks,
as if I existed in the gaps of memory
with the ghosts of the wind and the water.
There’s an ancient, liquid language
over the dunes, the middens,
and a sudden, eerie chill lifts me up,
and like a great wave in the throes of being itself,
tosses me as if I were weed.
Belonging
Women, squatting on spinifex,
weave green reed baskets for the tourists.
Their skirts are a brilliant blaze
against the red earth.
Their eyes and teeth a shock of whiteness.
Their talk on and on
is as old as the sand.
Now one of them, a wizened Elder,
tells stories about the water-holes, the rocks,
the stars in their flight across the seasons.
About the Dreamtime,
Uluru and the Snake-people,
how terrible things happen
if ancient laws are violated.
Her voice is eerie,
as if from deep in the earth,
it resonates like the long vowels
of a didgeridoo.
Then one woman, feeling movement
in the spinifex beneath her,
springs to her feet.
Cheeky blighter, she says,
and with sleight of hand
flings a snake into the air,
a Brown, writhing—its flat head
flaring against the cobalt sky.
Now their laughter
swims through the coolabah trees,
fingers the reeds
like a cool breeze.
A hawk is hovering high up,
too far away,
like me to feel that kind of belonging
to this curious land.
Yesterday
After Judith Wright
A storm roiled in an icy blue-green front
and set the early light back an hour.
The willie wagtail, in his surplice and cassock,
retraced his steps to stillness, and the giddy wrens,
Blues with their Jennies, vanished.
After the bucketing, the earth squeezed
it’s citrus everywhere, the trees scintillated
a trillion suns. The dam receded under the sheen,
and the scent of pollens punctuated the silence.
I rested easy in my age. The wrens returned,
thirty or so, like wind-blown flowers on the lawn
and along the long, low sills, their rivals danced
in the glass, the pane thin between us.
Then, I vowed never to worry again
about this vertiginous life.
But, the dazzle dissolved too soon,
and things were as they had been before,
except the dam had filled, darker. From the stony rim
old-age stepped, with her palms extended,
and yesterday now blooms with a new flourish.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Priyadarshi Patnaik (b. 1969) is a creative writer, painter, translator and photographer. A number of his poems and short-fiction have appeared in various journals outside and in India including Ariel, Oyster Boy Review, Hudson View, Melic Review, Still, Toronto Review, Kavya Bharati, Indian Literature and Muse India. His translations and critical writings on translation have appeared in Translation Today, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, Muse India and many edited volumes.
He has published two anthologies of poems, a critical work on Indian aesthetics and co-edited two volumes on Aging and Dying (Sage) and Time in the Indian Context (D K Printworld-in Press). He is presently editing a volume on Orissan Medieval Poets and writing a monograph on poet Achyutananda for Orissa Sahitya Akademi.
Patnaik is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur, where he teaches literature, communication and visual aesthetics. His research interests include Indian aesthetics, media & multimedia studies, visual & nonverbal communication, and translation.
My Daughter’s Shadow
Surprised they can touch
They stand still
They have so many colours
you will be amazed
by their depth texture
the shapes they take
like water
real-unreal
on the other side of light
somewhat shaped like your body
strapped to it
Yours is frozen in wonder
like a small still fish
and mine tired
smelling distant death
What else can I do
on this first meeting
this brief introduction
but say
“Look, this is your S-H-A-D-O-W!”
Night at Jagannatha Temple
The star-printed wall-paper sky
flutters lightly against dark sandstones
The sleeping priests dream miracles
of holding shadow-of-time in hand
Lamps go out against temple walls
– widows’ dirty white sarees
Silence wind of ages breathes
thousand whispers of dark blue sea
Ancient mouths of stones keep secret
A knife cuts the shout of life from death
The old men look at the world like it is a memory
Ernesto Sabato
Your voice breaks over the harmonium
like an old leaf the colour of
autumn as the notes of thumri fade
into the distance in their
ageless sadness the way
they did twenty years back
An old man is only a memory
of a life that has lived him
like wind passing through the
grooves of a drying leaf
Your voice breaks again
My memories play with your
notes – ancient rains that
course through the veins of the day
– my seventy year old memory that
has already lost me
thumri: A form in Indian classical music
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Cameron Lowe lives in Geelong and works as a plasterer. His writing has appeared in Island, Meanjin, The Age & The Best Australian Poetry 2007 (UQP). Throwing Stones at the Sun, a chapbook of his poems was published by Whitmore Press in 2005. He is currently undertaking postgraduate study at The University of Melbourne.
Fins
for Alice
Deferring to wind & water a sort of swimming
begins, an allowance for flotsam on the tides of memory,
ambit lights glowing in the midnight depths,
slivers of silver teasing at the edges of sight.
To be alone, then,
moonlight playing upon the sea’s skin.
Thinking scales, a child’s game of spindly fins,
the past rising toward its surface of familiars,
the things we are, in this darkness,
& the things we are not,
the dried thing we found on the tide line,
going a little green about the gills.
There will always be this gentle stirring,
this need to hold onto something
even as it changes shape, the little fish’s lullaby,
or the siren song amid the storm,
swimming in a music that breaks upon no shore.
Breathing
‘at the shores of the afternoon’
Nick Riemer
Between painted lips,
or deeper inside the body,
closer to the chest’s cavity,
listening to her swimsuit swelling,
fingers a clutch of leaves
swaying in the summer breeze,
hands smoothly-shaped stones,
the diaphragm contracting,
even now that eyes are closed.
Seashells, she might say suddenly,
half-asleep in the sun, dreaming
perhaps, of distant, pebbled shores,
little waves rising,
crumbling, repeating again & again,
meddling with memory, the map
of her back itself an ocean,
glistening with oil,
under the long echoing blue sky.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dilip Chitre n 1938 in Baroda, India. Studied in Mumbai. After graduating in 1959, taught English for three years in Ethiopia, returning to Mumbai in 1963, worked as a journalist, columnist, commentator, editor. Was Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA from 1975 to 1977, Back in India, made films, painted, roamed around. Now live in Pune, Maharashtra for the last 25 years. Published 30 books in all, 5 in German translation, Won many prizes, honours, and awards. Travelled all over Europe, parts of Asia, and Africa.
The Ninth Breakfast: Astrological Forecast
Sometimes a mere sausage portends,
Waiter, the coming shadow
Of Saturn. Sad days begin
Insignificantly. But sinister days
Foretell their ways. The innocent sausage in one’s plate
Grows into a cobra. And one knows
That the tables have begun
To turn.
On a Saturday you never
Get horseshoes for breakfast.
But a severe exhortation
In the morning’s editorial
On the duties of a citizen.
Here, where the cows are sacred,
And pigs taboo, a starving mob
Glares at your subversive sausage
Whose shape, moreover, is an implicit
Insult to Shiva’s phallus,
And you choke because you know
One man
Is another man’s breakfast.
No thanks. I’ll only have tea and toast.
Absence From Myself
I am emptying my shelves and my drawers
I cannot cope with their contents
Any longer. They connect with a past
That hardly seems mine though known to me.
The shelves contain books, of course,
And some of them go a long way
Into a memory not exactly my own
Where my treacherous roots lie
Into humanity’s favourite myths.
The drawers contain documents, notes,
Unfinished manuscripts, faded photographs,
Letters, memorabilia, and possessions
That could be called mere fetishes.
Alternatively, one could call it heritage.
My father’s dead and my only son died too
Within just a short span separating them
And I would be someone sandwiched
Between them—a piece of living history
Between two dead ends.
I am the one that has endured and survived
Two ends of history and the emptiness
Of shelves and drawers and largely
Unwritten books, abandoned poems,
Unfinished paintings, unrealised films,
Spaces more empty than filled,
Occupied and left.
Spaces, spaces, spaces.
Time leaves no detail untouched
And time takes all details away.
My ancestor’s gone and so is my successor.
That leaves me no space but
Here and now, no room to negotiate,
Not even an edge to fall off from.
I am exquisitely here and now
And where I never before was
Nor ever will be.
Moreover, this is not an end.
From Moscow To Leningrad (1980)
From Moscow to Leningrad
I was travelling through a three-dimensional notebook
The notebook had mile after mile of snow
The notebook had railway tracks
Close to my chest there was a broken
Anthill the size of a woman
Close to my chest were eighteen she-cobras
Close to my chest was powdered turmeric
My body flung northwards
Pointed to the Pole
Whose sins were washed out by that journey
Whose wounds bled away in that journey
There were characters written in the notebook
Spreading like fire through the snow
In the shape of a spark.
Underneath the Chandeliers Hung by Stalin
Underneath the chandeliers hung by Stalin
People swarm to buy bread
And at a distance stand the churches of Christ
Detached and compassionate
Underneath this Russian snow there could be
Several flowering plants of poetry
Countless thorny solitudes
The bones of former citizens
On the Way to Petrograd/Leningrad
(—for Irina )
Time turns to ice
Boots fall into a vanishing line
The grief of black living eyes
Lies hidden in the groin
Ointment on a tender spot
Graft on an alien branch
In the closed car of a train
Disoriented copulation
The ice of coals shovelled into
A couple of hours of intimacy
The rail track is refreshed by
Wheels speeding over it
From Moscow to Leningrad
You commit adultery and it’s a torture
And this Express goes
Right up to Finland
Towards the land of White Nights
The tall ghost of Peter the Great
The solid buildings of the navy
The palaces, the squares, the canals,
The innocent eyes of Mandelstam
Pushkin’s love affair
Lenin’s speech
Dostoevsky’s vigil in terror
And the European masterpieces
In the Hermitage
Before the Revolution and after
All this is eternal
The Great War and the great peace
The pleading breasts
Of a starved woman
Her thighs gone awry
Vodka dripping over her shoulders and body
And as a frightened sparrow hits a wall in its search for a window in the dark
Her breath enters my nostrils and my mouth as she gasps for air
I do not dare to write a poem
On all this
Our own relatives will become the angels of death
To exile us into Siberia
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Ali Alizadeh is an Iranian-born Australian writer. His books include the novel The New Angel (Transit Lounge Publishing, 2008); with Ken Avery, translations of medieval Sufi poetry Fifty Poems of Attar (re.press, 2007); and the collection of poetry Eyes in Times of War (Salt Publishing, 2006). The main themes of his writing are history, spirituality and dissent. His current projects include a nonfiction novel about the life of his grandfather (to be published in 2010) and, with John Kinsella, an anthology of Persian poetry in translation.
A Familial Rennaissance
for Saf
Like the Italian one, my family’s rebirth
spawned masterpieces, caused a breakdown
like the civil wars of the Reformation
with few victors, countless casualties. Mine
a kind of persecution: bullied, beaten
at school for being a ‘dirty terrorist’ and
my resurrection stunted, my ‘new
start’ delayed. Immigration was more than
traumatic, abusive, for my father: defeat
and capitulation at the hands of employers
dreading a foreign-educated ‘wog’ without
‘acceptable’ Western work history. Mum’s
reshaping as an ‘Aussie’ almost aborted:
she returned to Iran (temporarily, it turned out)
when denied recognition of her degrees
by the union. I took up drugs; became a drunk
to forget the bullies, banish from my ears
the din of my parents’ jousts in the kitchen. But
my sister, a triumphant genius, the Leonardo
of this renaissance tale: the death of her Iranian
identity, followed by calm gestation – caring
daughter in the crossfire between workless father
and alcoholic brother – and then, yes, successful
delivery: a modern young woman, her alacrity
salary, property, paid holidays, etc. In photos
her posture, an homage to Michelangelo’s David.
A Sufi’s Remonstrance
I’m sick of You. Your magnificence
precipitates mental pain, ethical
cramps. That You continue to shine
blinds, asphyxiates, twists the sinews
of my words. How dare You bewitch
in an aeon like this? 14 year-old
Iraqi girl kidnapped, raped, burnt alive
by American servicemen; Palestinian
toddler’s head pulped by the shrapnel
of Israeli bombs; sleepy Israeli civilian
shattered by rubble while drinking tea; not
to forget the forgotten diseased, starved
billions expiring in the squalid ghettos
of ‘globalisation’. Could You possibly
justify the garish brilliance of your
intractable, effervescent spring
as rivers shrivel and soil turns saline
due to pitiless ‘progress’? Or the candle
of compassion in this starless night
of cyclic hatred? I honestly can’t help
my revulsion at Your volition to remain
prodigious, enchanting, Beloved. So what
if You discharge life, if my life is nothing
but a valley along the trajectory of return
to You? You flaunt the ecstasies of Union
and transcendence when reality demands
outrage and obduracy. Why won’t You
let me loathe my fellow creatures instead
of being mesmerised by Your allure? It turns
my stomach, aches my intellect, since I hope
and even occasionally smile, sleep and dream
in spite of the calamities, because of You.
Dubai
I can’t pretend
there’s beauty to exhume
from these slabs
concrete and sandstone
planted in the sand
funereal totems. I can’t
harmonise with the drill
fracturing the boulders
beneath the desert
puncturing the landscape
holes to insert
pillars as foundation
for incipient towers
towards a veritable
concrete forest. What
palm trees remain, inspire
the outline of the artificial
island, beach resort
to A-list celebrities. Camels
happy and humanised
logos on T-shirts
at the gargantuan mall
the largest in the world
outside of USA. Burger King
and co. don’t clash
but complement the Arabic
kitsch. I can’t conjure
my gifts (meager
as they are) enough
to resemble this reality
in an aesthetically refined
string of words: only this
beveled cluster
of clauses and the like
summoned by a Colossus
of a place called Dubai.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dinah Roma-Sianturi is an associate professor of literature and the director of the De La Salle University’s Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center (Manila). Her first collection of poetry A Feast Of Origins (2004) was given the National Book Award by the Manila Critics’ Circle while her recent work Geographies of Light (2007) won a Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature.
Family Portrait
Where I touch their faces
creases cut through their gaze,
dreading the escape
past the lens.
Too many times I looked,
too many times I fancied
where they had gone after
the stillness, how into the fields
blurred by their shadows, they had
shaken the horror off their bones.
Among them, I could have
taken my place, stepped into
the imperceptible pact of light
and shadow, past and present
conniving where I’d stand
in that instance of bodies
composed for history—
Next to my mother, perhaps, barely
sixteen, faint in the background,
her lean arms limp at her side;
or, beside my aunt, a nimble girl,
whose hair shorn of passion,
sang herself to exile.
What story of that year
and place recalls the daybreak
they were herded into the river mouth,
the hour calmed by the leaves’
consenting sway?
In this airy, well-lit room,
a tale long sealed in glass
shimmers each time light shines
on them now, as when sun hits
water, as when surface breaks
in ripples of fear.
After Hafez
I did as you say.
I did not surrender
my loneliness
too soon.
I waited for what
it can teach me
of heaven
and earth,
of what keeps
them apart.
What blessing it is
when voice breaks
crying out for God—
a heart seasoned,
the body scarred
by cuts deeper
than divine.
The Naked Imperative
Endure is what the morning
Wants to say each time dawn
Bares the gentle sprawl
Of her body as light seeps
Through the thin shade
Failing to honor why she is here—
The shifts of joy, the unbelief
In promise that moves her
Past space, her steps,
The pardon of distance.
And what is it like
When she stands bearing
The gift she mourns and seeks,
The desire that comes
With the world, and offers
No door out of it?
Endure is this
Woman’s will and giving.
The earth stirred, hewn
By its own longing.
She is still. Naked. Sleep
Of deep valleys, ridges and planes—
The nightfall’s landscape
Of blissful absolution.
January 1, 2011 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dr. Rizio Yohannan Raj is a bilingual writer who has published poetry, fiction, translations, criticism and children’s literature in English and Malayalam.
Her debut novel in Malayalam, Avinashom (2000) was shortlisted for the DC Books Silver Jubilee Award and is presently being translated into English. Her second novel Yatrikom was published to critical acclaim in 2004. She was part of the revival of the Mumbai Poetry Circle while she lived in the city. Her poems in English have appeared in journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Her debut collection, Naked by the Sabarmati and Other Guna Poems is under publication at the Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi.
Rizio has also translated into English, some of the landmark poetical works in Malayalam such as Kumaran Asan’s Veenapoovu and Chintavishtayaya Sita, and many of the 20th Century Malayalam writers from various generations. She has done translations from other languages, the latest of which include two novels by the Swedish writer Torgny Lindgren, The Way of the Serpent and Sweetness into Malayalam, and the co-translation of the first single collection of Maithili poetry in English, Udaya Narayana Singh’s Second Personal Singular. She has also translated and introduced Gujarati and Marathi Dalit poetry into Malayalam.
Apart from her literary writings, Rizio has been balancing two simultaneous careers in publishing and higher education. During her decade-long career as a books editor, she had headed the editorial departments of Navneet (Mumbai) and Katha (New Delhi). A PhD in Comparative Literature, she has also been a faculty member in the Mass Media department of Sophia College, Mumbai. She lives between her home in Mumbai and Kasaragod, Kerala, where she serves as Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at the Central University of Kerala.
Tree
While the show is on
beneath its sprawling shade,
age creeps in
without the tree knowing it.
Suddenly
the whole spectacle
is another ring of memory,
the trunk, older by a year.
Naked by the Sabarmati
1
Dream:
You beckon me from the purple trail of the day,
I rise from the warm shore:
our clasped hands, a thorny globe in mid-air.
The salt in the air nearly blinds us;
yet we look into each other’s eyes
and find the first stars of the evening.
‘We must cross the night together:
it is time we sought the river.’
2
Journey:
The silhouette of the hills
is a reverie etched along the horizon.
We are as prayerful as the trees,
hymns frozen on their way to God.
We walk under the moon in growing silence,
waiting for a song to come by.
Someone whimpers–
a feverish piccolo or a sunflower withering?
It’s one of those strange nights
one smells the dew on autumn leaves.
I close my eyes and chant –
Wind! Wind! Wind!
3
The road leads us to the wall of the city by the river.
We press our palms against it;
our touch, a sigh dividing a swell of silence.
The wall eagerly splits before us: we enter the city:
hushed slums and stained minarets, our witnesses.
But where are the men and women
who had painted dreams of hukkah on my autumn nights –
the handsome kite-flyer, the fat woman of wit,
the bearded old philosopher, the paanwali behenji,
the turbaned tractor driver, the Madrasi mechanic?
Where are the farmers
who had squatted upon after-harvest stories –
Chandrakant, Lalitabai, Bhoomir Dhrumesh, Fatema, Aalam?
Where are the sleeping children?
Where are the bhajans? Where is the banyan?
4
A tremor runs
down to my toes.
‘Your hands are flushed, ’
your quivering voice breaks deeper into the air.
Dear, I am red from within; I have swallowed embers:
words, gestures, silence.
You know it; your face shows your knowledge—
the stars in your eyes are tired while you whisper.
I cannot bear uncertainty any more, and run to the river.
But there are only dead stars and our pallid reflections in it.
Comrade, can you name this moment
to which even the river has lost its flux?
5
Perhaps, the river must wait
before it can flow again,
for everything waits:
field for seed,
serpent for woman,
fig for hunger,
rock for diamond,
bansuri for breath,
quill for ink,
parchment for Time
Waiting fills the elements, too:
a white piece of sky
a coppery speck of land
a cobalt drop of sea
a black pole of wind
an orange sun,
wait for Word.
6
And then you and I run
as though a lightning has entered us.
Through the flight our clothes leave us
one by one, till the skies offer
themselves to us, and we grow wings.
The peeling was abrupt; nothing
had prepared us for this bareness.
Now we are gliding witnesses
to the trembling of the city –
is it seized by fear or shame?
We can’t make out:
Have we been late in arriving?
Have we no choice now
but to flee in our starkness
as though our sins are chasing us?
7
City of opposites,
along our naked flight across your breast,
you remind us of our one true Spartan.
His frail body had warned us
against choking in our clothes,
like truth getting lost in words.
We now remember our semi-clad martinet,
and see how this age asks for all we have
to be allowed to return to our nature.
From the bare banks of this river
it is clear now: we have endured too many guises;
a shedding is inevitable.
We must lose all our garbs:
we must turn digambaras,
with just the ashen horizon on us.
Our wild bodies alone may save us now:
they will tell this blind century
that we are woman and man first.
Our nakedness will again connect us
with this river,
and with each other.
8
Hope:
There, the river calls us now to its flow,
even as our last clothes renounce us:
‘Let us share our remains:
you, the sweat on your brows, and I, my longing.’
Now you and I stand in knowledge of each other
as in a garden of memories.
With infinite tenderness I tell you,
‘Comrade, let us celebrate our freedom.’
We embrace by the Sabarmati,
bare, forgetful.
And we enter the flowing river:
light floods us –
Light.
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