Nostalgia on a March morning: Five poems mixing memory and desire

Art by Gaurvi Sharma

Five Couplets For What Has Gone By

by Anupama Raju

Fill the glass with shards of the past.
Do not drink, but learn to build from the past.

Memory is antidote to love, when the heart recalls.
Do not remember, resist with words killed in the past.

The body is a deserted battlefield. Trading victory for identity.
Do not fight. Not with weapons unskilled in the past.

Your photograph has started to bleed. Drip into old calendars.
Do not wipe it, because it has spilled into the past.

Lips are sour. Wine turns to water. Water returns to tide.
Don’t drown in it. Rise, she demands, with your unfulfilled past.

This poem was originally published here.

Summer House Café

by Karthik Purushothaman

“Has anyone ever
adored you?” I asked you

sitting across the table,
sticking to my resume.
I couldn’t flex a muscle

-car, wouldn’t win
a bar fight and hadn’t

scaled a snow-capped
mountain. I had
flown on airplanes

less times than you’ve had
teeth extracted. I didn’t

believe in penetration
if I had to
butter you up first

especially not with
your lactose intolerance.

I was the dive
at the mouth of a road
leading to treasure

troves of trimmed beards.
I was just one beer who

couldn’t afford the second.
I was the child of dirt
who thought you smelt

like the kiss I stole
under streetlight.

In Memoriam

by Karthika Nair

I. Relics

You didn’t leave much behind when you slipped
silent through some unseen crevice in time.

The scent of a name swiftly rent by tearful
chords (shreds hung in the air, just out of reach).

Biannual torrents of dayspring rites
when payasam and prayer flash-flooded
the neighbourhood – baffling me for nine years…

Shadows from laughing eyes I had found
frozen on cellulose strips ( and long thought
were mine) crypted within the covers of
velveteen books on a high, unfriendly shelf.

A three-line memorial in a pale blue file:
life and love scaled to disease, diagnosis,
death with date and description, nothing
more – aseptic headstone raised for a ghost
star who didn’t leave much behind.

Other remains crowded out yours by and by.

Wordless fury at survival kept under cobalt
paternal lock, bluebeard’s chamber that opened
only to one knock;
glaciers of growing
loss left as moraines on a mother’s face;
rising
debris from the link between you and me –
neatly piled beside the same crevice I lose
my way back to, over and over, with no effort at all.

You didn’t leave much behind, but nothingness
can expand into a red giant with grief at its core.

II. Resurrection

I tried remaking you with swatches of stolen
memory, seaming a harlequin next-of-kin.

First raided the maternal troves: traced
shapes out of mother’s soundlessness; snipped
yarn from her three chirpy younger sisters.

I didn’t spare granny either, sifting her
cataractal mind for traces of your smile.

(kept clear off the men folk though: they stood
guard night and day over theirs, buried ten-foot
deep in child and prowler-proof vaults.)

You stayed sketchy, all dots, shades and split
helixes – a silhouette behind a shattered
pane, touching which made thoughts bleed.

So the thieving spread wider and wilder.
I sought your colours, contours all over:

A head among tousled monsoon clouds
your gaze on the burnished afternoon earth
the voice in local summer tides.

The name, the name grew everywhere:
in myths and magazines, or family
trees, fiction, television – any one I chose
could wipe out another possible you.

You walked with me, travelling through
childhood, teenage, voting-right-hood…
I changed templates, crafted new ones through the ride.
Till the time it felt too much like work,
too much a snail within a turtle’s shuck.

Unravelled you on land’s edge, then watched
my patchwork sibling return to the clouds,
the sun, the sea – and someone’s memory.

This poem was originally published in Bearings, HarperCollins India.

Drift

by Sohini Basak

this evening my memory turned translucent
like the bloom of moon jellyfish
we saw behind glass, exactly ten years ago
in an aquarium swim-dreaming neon

or, like the other time, I cannot remember
exactly how long ago, but you were toe-digging
sand on a summer holiday when the coastline
turned plasma out of the slush blue because there
it was trapped, pinned with broken bits of sea-shells
cushioned in brine, dead but refusing to decay

closer home, translucent like the used plastic bag
you let go from your hand yesterday unnoticed
now circling over some ocean yearning to hold
water over the wind mirroring tide swells

This poem was originally published by RædLeafPoetry-India.

Lassan ਲਸਣ: Garlic

by Amarjit Chandan

(Translated from Punjabi by the author with Amin Mughal)

In a distant country
When you come across a compatriot
You are thrilled to the bones
Your eyes and your hands reach out to him
And a chain of words is formed

I came on it once, the Punjabi word “Lassan”
written up on a huge billboard
For women farm workers
In a far-flung corner of California
And I felt

My language had welcomed me
Shaken my hands
Embraced me
Wished me good luck
For a moment the taste of the word
Lassan was like
A sugar lump on my tongue

Only words die
As a fish dies out of water
They lose their meanings
And gather new ones
Here the word Lassan means
Fifteen dollars a day
Bricks of the house
Ticks of the clock
A crane left behind in anguish
Gold ornaments
dresses and rings

The deep troubled waters of greed and indulgence
And very few fish escape the net

This selection is curated by Rohini Kejriwal. She also curates The Alipore Post, a daily newsletter stemming from a love of​ art, poetry, music, and all things beautiful.