‘I’ve inherited nothing of your gentle ways or culinary skills’: Four poems by Robin S Ngangom

A Poem for Mother
(after Salvatore Quasimodo)

Palem Apokpi, mother who gave birth to me,
to be a man how I hated leaving home
ten years ago. Now these hills
have grown on me.
But I’m still your painfully shy son
with a ravenous appetite,
the boy who lost many teeth
emptying your larder. And
I am also your dreamy-eyed lad
who gave you difficult times
during his schooldays, romancing
with every girl he met, even
when he still wore half-pants.

You told your children that
money and time do not grow on trees.
But how does one ever learn to use them?
It isn’t that I’ve forgotten
what you’ve come to mean to me
although I abandoned so much, and left
so little of myself at home
to remember me by.

I know how you work your fingers to the bone
as all mothers do, for unmarried sons,
ageing husband and liberated daughters-in-law.
Worried about us, for a long time
your lips couldn’t flower into a smile,
lines have furrowed your face and
the signs of snow are on your hair.

Today, as on every day, you must have risen
with temple bells before cockcrow, swept
the floors and after the sacred bath,
cooked for the remainder of us. I can see you
returning every dusk from the bazaar,
your head laden with baskets.

Must you end toiling forever?
I’m sorry Palem.
I’ve inherited nothing
of your gentle ways or culinary skills.
Forgive me, for all your dreams
of happiness during your remnant days,
I only turned out to be a small man
with small dreams.

Weekend

The man returns home drunk, late Saturday night
ascends the steps, floorboards creaking.
He bangs at the door, shouting at the woman.
Bleary-eyed, the woman opens the door.
Once inside, the man picks up an argument with the woman.
He says the woman doesn’t love him.
He says she treats him badly and on purpose.
The woman replies without stop.
The man starts berating, then manhandling the woman,
rather gently, not violently,
as if he’s dusting a costly vase,
afraid to break her.
The woman bawls in the inert, humid night.
The children start crying loudly too.
“Our mummy’s dead, she’s done for!”
The man can hold himself no longer.
His face goes all green.
He vomits noisily all over the place.
He starts whimpering too.
Suddenly, the man rushes out in the muggy night.
The woman rushes after him.
From somewhere on the calm road she drags him back.
The woman cleans up.
After a while, all is silence.
The man is heard snoring later.
Another Saturday drops from the calendar.

In the morning, the man teases the woman in bed.
The woman, not angrily, but rather pleasantly, says:
“Please stop, not in front of the children.”
They share a smoke. After a while the woman gets up.
She goes to the kitchen and sings
A popular film song. But she has forgotten the lyrics.
So she makes up her own meaningless lines.
She starts cooking with the children.
The man belches loudly after lunch.
In the afternoon, the man goes out,
the woman with him, their arms coupled.
They are dressed in their Sunday best.
The children are left playing in the yard.
They want candies on a Sunday.

This weekend is spent.

I Walk the Khasi Winter Sunlight
(after Dennis Brutus)

I walk the Khasi winter sunlight
and see something akin to hope
turning the cherry trees
with an old grief returning.

When violent blood sleeps under winter earth
unrelenting youth retraces it steps
on winter’s street with a lover’s swagger
and I watch beauty from a careful distance
outlined on December’s warm meadows
their laughter woven in the wind.
I hear again the merry guitar
and church bells ringing for the erring sons
and see the custodians of justice
inside their polished gods,
on their composed visages an unreal light.

And I think of the hills’ imprisoned evenings,
and the boys far from home squatting in their cells,
in their breasts hope fading
and grim embers burning their eyes,
their days an empty platter
their nights a dark shroud.
And I think of their captors
feeding the meals of hatred,
and their mothers awaiting their return
their faces veiling the mottled colour of fear,
and only lugubrious drums beating in my heart.

The Ignominy of Geometry

The ignominy of geometry,
the inability to evade angles and parallels.
Living, we have to suffer that mortification
which robs the sacrifice of joy
of much of its sheen.

One minute of patronising certainty and
the boring man is a “square”
but when our understanding’s poor
someone’s off on a tangent, and
that dark excitement we all secretly envy
is an eternal triangle,
or, when two people cannot agree (naturally)
they are diametrically opposed,
bowing again to geometry,
a language of precision
to measure our imprecise lives.

We were given a white emptiness and
left to our devices.
Wanting more from life than mere life
we tried to fill that emptiness
with lush pigments, beauty, purpose,
a finishing touch of children.

We went looking for subjects in time and space
creating moments under cherry trees, lifting glasses to youth,
but merely fulfilled reprise’s oracle and
we speak of a wheel coming full circle.
The ignominy of geometry,
the inability to see beyond centres and triangles.

Even my love was flesh and blood
because I had put my mouth on her lips.
Yet a wheel’s fortune disdained us and
we became two tiny points of light
on that white emptiness,
drawing unhappy parallel lines.

Excerpted with permission from My Invented Land: New and Selected Poems, Robin S Ngangom, Speaking Tiger.