By Sarita Jenamani
Winter in Vienna
Winter is usually foggy here
It blurs the reflection of your dream
in the mirror of your imagination
Night does not sojourn here
but when the snowy night
passes through the city
a violet glow envelopes everything
A certain passion erupts in me
and jumps back to its own caldera
Conversation is a sin here
Voice darkens and submerges in the sorcery of silence
Snow trickles into the stillness
Exile
All through life
an unending journey
accompanies you
And in the absence of
a destination
much of what’s inside gets lost
And the warp and weft of being
keeps on breaking
Beyond
Stillness spreads its wings
like the desert
beneath a dawning sky
The paraplegic pyramids glitter
in a mixture of azure and gold
There is still a lot to say
beyond civilization
Viennese Coffee-houses
No sooner does dusk fall
than the city’s cafés come to life
with the tinkling clang of indifference
Gradually the crowd of solitude gathers
around the tables
Sankt Marx Friedhof*
Silence is magnificent
particularly when it connects
the monumental music of lives
that sleep peacefully
with the absolute space
Flowers and graves shoot up
rupturing earth’s breast
They exist side by side in stillness
I wonder what they think
of volatile souls that travel to the sky
with the chanting
of mysterious mantras
or of those who wait
for an undefined time to resurrect
Beyond cemetery’s wall
a swarm of sound passes through
slicing the essence of existence
in our trivial time
*Mozart was buried in St. Marx Communal Cemetery, Vienna.
(These poems are excerpted from her latest collection, Till the Next Wave Comes)
Sarita Jenamani is a poet of Indian origin based in Austria, a literary translator, anthologist, and editor of a bilingual magazine for migrant literature – Words & Worlds – a human rights activist, a feminist and general secretary of PEN International’s Austrian chapter. She has three collections of poetry. She writes in English, Odia and translates to and from German. Sarita translated Rose Ausländer, a leading Austrian poet, and an anthology of contemporary Austrian Poetry from German into Hindi and Odia. She has received many literary fellowships in Germany and in Austria including those of the prestigious organizations of ‘Heinrich Böll Foundation’ and ‘Künstlerdorf Schöppingen’. She studied Economics and Management Studies in India and Austria where she works as a marketing manager.
