‘I read about war to avoid this thing called peace’: Six poems from Sridala Swami’s new books

Dear stranger deciphering this ancient script

Dear stranger, dear sentient being from a future so far I cannot imagine anything about it:

not the shape of poems
not the way you will handle the corners
of pages
not the science you will use to decipher
this ancient script in which I write but which to me is given and taken for granted,

Dear stranger who makes my work timeless and immortal, for whose eyes only I seal this message in the bottle of centuries,

Dear salvager, dear rescue artist, dear hauntologist:

What have you done?

I wrote to escape attention. There was a brief sentence I had to serve before remembrance could be not about what has been. I wanted to fall like dust and be renewed in leaves.

How much have you forgotten?

I would like these words to be like a child’s first drawings. If you must, keep them as you would a stone you picked to remember a place you visited.

Dear stranger, I say these things because I know they will mean nothing to you.

Idle Bliss

After Auden

I am transcribing the sunshine.
The river flows backwards and the sky
borrows the light from it.

I fall upwards, a returning spacewalker
in free fall.
There is no land.

This is idle bliss: to plunge
and never land, to jump
and meet only cloudy ocean.

To forget the moment before
lose the effort
and become cloud

carrying its own sun within
lit, idle, eliding effort for fun.

[This thing called peace]

I read about war to avoid this thing
called peace hovering uneasily over our days.

The planes prowl the dark skies seeking
places people can’t find on a map.

Afterwards, the story-telling:
it’s simple, it’s complicated.

As the day moves from longitude to longitude
the world moves from peace to peace

following the drums
of war or justice, it’s hard to tell which.

Rituals of departure

“The first desire will accompany you to the last breath.”

— Etel Adnan

For years I thought of nothing but my father’s death and the manner of its arrival: the prognosis so sudden and dramatic, the lingering decade when we treated the disease like an honoured guest that we wouldn’t allow to leave, coddling it, and later accompanying it as it made to depart, dreading the lives that would be uprooted by the force of its final departure, as it was said the trees uprooted themselves to follow Hanuman as he took off for Lanka, not wanting to be parted from him but falling back to earth after all, as they must, and having to live with the consequences of the violence, and its aftermath.

We were ravaged but we recovered. Years later, when my own body began to alert me to its impermanence, I ignored it. Other people needed my attention more and I gave it. My body, insistent, showed me where it would give. Was I surprised that in this matter it followed my father? The path was already familiar. Death would come but could it not be invited in, the customs and forms of its welcome already in place and no surprises along the way? It may not have been what I had desired but in this particular avatar it was a companion I was familiar with. I could be a courteous host to this old guest leave when it does, quietly and in silence, just as my father did.

Divination

Two days into life’s last quarter, I look back at yesterday as if it was long ago.
In the scheme of things, the time I had and the time left to me
yesterday might as well have been a long time ago
and with the perfection of hindsight I can see that it began badly.

The signs were there: the overheating body, the fingers like little balloons
or empty surgical gloves unanimated by flesh and mind. I am saying
the accident may have been inevitable. Another sign:
the sense of anticipation of plans made – looking ahead with pleasure.

This is how the unexpected and the unwelcome make a home somewhere
at the back of the rib cage, unreachable yet ever-present, unpleasant.
This is me making a soft house for dread around my waist.
I carry my future within my body, as I always have, but more consciously now.

Other people’s broken bones and lives changed in an instant, a shock
to my system. This is selfishness at work, looking for lessons in misfortunes –
anyone’s will do so long as I am involved even slightly. It could have been me.
I don’t want it to be me, or my loved ones, not ever. I want all the luck

and I want it to never run out and I want it to bless everyone I point it at
like a holy censer, an ever-replenished balm, a fountain of all that could
go wrong but didn’t
and I still don’t know how it will end but I want it to be sudden and final.

Swallowing silk

That fan again, dangerous and low
your voice beating the air
shaking the dust down upon us
these cane-backed chairs and art deco tiles.

The tea is orange, skinned over.
I coat my tongue with a thick silence
watch the world go by
out the two exits here.

You talk while I put on my listening face
the one I perfected in the first row
of every classroom I’ve ever been in.
A notebook would make me look even more attentive.

There’s a glass of water on the table.
The forensic light shows up
fingerprints. I run a finger down the side
erasing another person as I go.

Outside, cycles and scooters
tilt into each other
as if nothing more important
will ever happen to them again.

You wind down.
The fan beats in the silence.
I sip water from the glass.
It tastes of camphor.

I am swallowing silk
and the distance we unfurled today
I fold it all away
and put it in fragrant storage.

Excerpted with permission from Run for the Shadows, Sridala Swami, Context.