Calicut to Cannore in Summer
The sun shines
on what I write
The rain is gone....
1
It is not mere water
It is rain
It is not mere rain
It is a river
It is not mere river
It is the sea....
2
Women are washing
dreams out of their eyes
They bend three to a row
Cows to the water
Their men gone
They are left with their bodies
... A boy wades out to sea
3
A woman washes her only blouse
Wears it wet
To douse desire...
One blouse is enough
One lifetime is enough
One heart is enough.
4
Venus in Quilandi
A girl rises
From the water
Men hold hands
They come to watch bathers
Hand in hand
They press down desire
So much
That only mockery is left
Their city's fame spreads:
Boys of Quilandi go hand in hand
The young girl rises
from the water
again and again.
5
Quilon is a memory:
I, 19 and conscienceless
He, 26 and womanless
A little sandalwood
Washes us of the deed
Its scent stayed
These twentytwo years
6
Tellicherry
How well I know
the platform
the benches
I shut my eyes
Sit on a bench
Open my wound
to read its book....
7
Calicut
the lanes da Gama knew
Nothing changes
Not politics
Not history
Not geography
And certainly not the maze of the heart.
8
Mahé
Old French house
on a hill
The French gone
The Hindu remains
Truly a Hindu
in a truly French house.
9
The male cloud
lowers over the earth
which is supine
A clear space separating them
is the clear space
that joins them.
10
In my hand:
Always a roof
always food
always a friend.
Live to a hundred
What better poem in need?
A green dream is happy
A desert means death
I dream desserts
awake happy
Coda
A landscape is not a poem
Nor is it a quarrel
Nor a soul-search
(a most public art)
A poem is words
on paper
on the wind
in others' children's hands
to tear at will
A poem is not rain
Nor is it dry
It is not mere music
from a nursery
It is not my mother's face
lost of an age
It is not a boy's body
found on a sheet
It does not have hands
though it has feet
In a green land
The feet move slow....
It fills my belly in hunger
It's my water in thirst
It is the drop at my centre
But it is not hope
It is merely an hour
Here, now
It's child's play for all children
It's the cash I bring the world.
It has rained
on a white sheet
of water in the bay
I brought it out dry
For you to wet
This is my poem: Take it!
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