Spring Show, March 2003


Adieu! for once again the fierce dispute
Betwixt damnation and impassion’d clay
Must I burn through;...
– John Keats, ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’


Once again the crackle of cities on fire
rocking life to death
on planks of shaky horizons
must we burn through. –

            How the hot winds sing in our ears!
            How they whip and sear
            our vulnerable skin!
            How they singe and scrape
            our delicate frayed eye-lashes!

                        Ringed in
by surging clouds of smoke,
we huddle together
as the cull draws to a close.
            We must not cough!

Our flesh is unwilling,
our spirit totters on the brink.
We are smoked to the bone
like herrings.
            Still
            we must not flinch!

Blinded by orange dust,
choking, inflamed with passion,
on this arena stage
men slaughter one another:
            the slayer and the slain
            enveloped in the same saffron haze –
            a dispersed stain.

They call it the best part of valour.
Discretion’s no part of this show, it seems. –
            It’s all action!
And a thoroughly open season,
those called friends and
those called foes alike
            being fair game!

Draped in black cloaks
that give them visual nobility,
their grim brows
clouded, belittled, bound,
women wail,
thirsting for cool springs,
rooting in the rubble
for buried afterbirths.
            They must be the Chorus!

I’m wondering
when they last washed their tresses,
those black rivers that surely cascade –
hidden from our eyes – over their
            hunched backs.

That dark energy
locked up in flowing hair
is kept leashed
for the duration of the show.
It would be unseemly –
            and wasteful –
to uproot fistfuls
in the gaze of the promiscuous public.
Such lethal energy must not be released. –
            No, not even for our sport!

            They rise,
            speaking to us in fingers,
            inscribing cobwebs in the air,
            inducting us into the show.

Quietly beads of sweat
trickle down their itchy scalps,
            their straining necks;
blood dribbles down their legs;
but as skilled Thespians
they must not be seen to scratch
their frazzled selves. –
            They must stay unfazed!

            Concealed within their cloaks,
            their still-growing breasts
            divide and multiply
            like rich clusters of grapes,
            like the breasts of the goddess
                        Artemis of Ephesus.

From the hollow of my heart
a fleshy tube arises,
protruding into the
            desiccating air:
            carrying
            drop by drop
            the juices of my despair
            upward
            to the invisible sun’s glare.

It forms a loop, a knot,
then straightens out.
It balloons into a great bud.
It bursts into giant
            scarlet flowers of sadness.

Petals of dried blood
darken, flake off, crumble,
mingling their smell with sausages,
as neighbours, watching the same show,
give a cautious welcome
            to the year’s first barbecue.

We have mysteries within mysteries:
near, nearer, nearest,
and far, farther, farthest –
the co-creative synergy
of the viewed and the viewer –
included, for our pleasure,
            in the same season ticket.

            Sweet spring degenerates
            into bird-call, wasp-buzz,
            the flapping of drying sheets,
            the cat’s silence,
            the return of last year’s mildew
            to the honeysuckle’s leaves –

as March resiliently advances.


Written in English. This poem was written for and read out at the Tears in the Fence Poetry Festival held at Dulwich College, London, on 28-29 March 2003. It was later published in Tears in the Fence, and is now going into my next English collection In That Sense You Touched It, forthcoming from Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. The entire collection is being incorporated as the first section of a double-decker volume, along with the work of another Indian woman poet.