Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 3, Number 1. May 2020. ISSN: 2581-7094
Her Story
I
need to hold on to something
Geography,
history or her story
To
read the map called desh
In
perfect lines of tiny dots
The
swaying red earthen pots
North
to South, West to East
Across
the moon-burnt fields
Behind
veils, smog and hills
In
kitchens, queues and kilns
In
wedding songs and lullabies
The
ribbons of the summer sun
Flutter
with the knots and lice
In
the unkempt hair of Her Story
Along
the dotted lines of my desh
With
borders on all sides, afresh!
Dear ‘M’, Dear ‘S’
The
sultry soot whispers to her Messenger app
Dear
‘M’ types Dear ‘S’, Dear ‘S’ sends a smiley
At
six-thirty sharp, they will meet at Aequalis Park
Where the sunset pours into a glass of whiskey
large
A maimed beggar dozes at the arc of pissing
alley
On
garbage heaps, two wretches fight, dogs play
Dear
‘M’ types a question mark, “in the park?”
Dear
‘S’ looks around, men smoke in the dark
There
is no music in a traffic-torn metropolis
Lights
blink like the eyes of canines at night
Dear ‘M’ adjusts the pleats of her silk saree
Dear
‘S’ loosens the straps of her laced lingerie
The
moon melts in the curves of their swinging hips
The city flows in a song between their mating
lips
Eyes
Our
eyes wander in the evening road
I look back in anger at the man, who
Threw
acid on my sister’s face,
She
bit the hairy hand that pounced at
Mini’s
breasts burning like oleanders—Red!
What
did you tell us, then?
In
chorus we repeated the line:
‘The
quality of mercy is not strained’
We
turned the pages writ in pain and bane
In
rain-soaked earth we whispered shame—
“Whatever,
it is, don’t utter the name.”
Our
stories grew in the aerial roots of a shady banyan
The
tree gazed with ten thousand eyes on her leaves
Underneath
her shady darkness some shadows smoked
They
called us dirty names, they licked their tongues
On
their six inches screens, when a sexy woman danced
A
branch broke on their smoking heads. All by chance!