‘Winter lingers over the sleeping sand dunes’: Five end-of-year poems by Ashwani Kumar

Beethoven’s Last Song

Summer returns –
streets are burning; houses are silent again.
Women give birth only women, with stones in their hands.

I still remember –
the god of sparrows was watching from the roof.
There were no survivors
in the temples or hospitals. A priest walks barefoot,
carrying milk and corn in his bowl for dead.

I am helpless, I can’t do anything –
only smile, and say good night
to girls playing Beethoven’s last song.

Why Are Gods Sobbing Silently?

It is the beginning of winter.
The sun is uncertain –
hiding in the black mirror of my house.
Is someone coming
or leaving the city? Not sure.
Children are going to school;
there are long lines at the grocery stores.
Something will happen now.
I hear a strange sound –
bread and biscuits start exploding like firecrackers.
What are we to do now?
We wash our guilt and carry boxes of chocolates
for gods sobbing silently.

Heidegger Hiding in the Hills

Heidegger is hiding in the hills.
If I come to your dream, will you love me?
She says – my eyelids are burning, but yes, I recall:
we first met in the fading light of a sanatorium.

Orchids in your orchard turn cannibal,
eating nomadic silkworms on pilgrimage.
Why is it that whenever I return home,
you frisk my flesh for a name?

I remember your breasts – soft, harmonium-shaped,
their harmonies flooding me with anonymous rāgas.
In deepest solitude we love like neighbours,
speaking of children, parents, butterflies –
our quiet debts to the earth.

Do you remember green, moonlit clouds
slipping down the drowsy slopes?
She says, I am painting my eyebrows –
but yes, I recall:
you were bathing in saintly summer rain

Cats, Cabbages and the Octopus

An unmarked strip of light appears –
an expensive surprise.
We know nothing of each other –
someone has just discovered us,
as if we were hermit cabbages,
trolled by monkeys in the supermarket.

Behind the totem trees of memory,
ailing smugglers sell sunglasses and sorrows
for the same price.
I wonder at the theologically organised universe,
smell my moon-burnt flesh,
grieving like a new age of anomalies.

Midnight here, midnight there.
There is no me, no you – only
our cats chasing the ageing octopus.

Going to Timbuktu

You’re going to Timbuktu, cats!
There is no history, no geography here –
only orchards of gold everywhere,
shining like scattered mustard seeds in darkness.
Irregular, treacherous roads bloom with thorny bushes,
traders of cinnamon and cloves riding slow, sighing camels.
At dusk, unmarried saints in high heels and Ankara prints
walk through mud-walled ancient libraries,
clutching pirated paperbacks of Aladdin and his Genie.
The night splits open –
the moon’s tongue silently traces the sky’s whispering thighs.
Swaying hips to the drum’s ancient, delirious beat,
warrior women feast on the ravenous flesh of lovers
at the hungry black lips of underground salt mines,
where bangles and beads clatter like the dry bones of gods in the wind.
Stroking their loins, sloping-nosed desert leopards
stalk the rebels,
plundering almond-eyed dancers in silk tents.
Blinding sandstorms rise –
floating rice fields vanish and return,
like half-remembered siblings in the dying sunset.
Somewhere, at the window of a forgotten tavern,
lizards lazily kiss twin lanterns,
smudged with memories of lost travellers –
winter lingers over the sleeping sand dunes,
pulsating with forbidden desires.
Resting against the naked stone, a blackbird sings:
I am earth – wet, and waiting.

“You’re going to Timbuktu, cats!” is from the 1978 Broadway musical Timbuktu!

Ashwani Kumar is a poet, writer and professor in Mumbai. Widely published, anthologised and translated into several Indian and International languages, his most recent book is Map of Memories (2025). The poems here are from his forthcoming collection, Loss of Ordinary Things.