DESIGNS IN KANTHA
Sewn into soft, worn layers,
forgotten fabric of grandmother tales –
patterns of the past,
secret memories, hidden designs,
intriguing patterns in silk strands
dyed in delicate dreamy shades—
embroidered story-lines
in exquisite, dainty kantha-stitch.
Years of laughter, heartache, bliss,
tears and yearning, rage, despair—
worked by artful needle into
guileless fictions of innocence,
pure and tender baby love.
Fleet fingers, fashioning
silent fables, designed to swaddle
innocent infant dreams, shielding
silk-soft folds of newborn skin
from reality’s needle-pricks,
abrasive touch of life in the raw.
(Previously published in Journal of the Poetry Society of India. Vol. 31 & 32, 2020-2021)
UPROOTED
Fallen tree on concrete sidewalk –
thirsty roots clawing the air, screaming silently
for the succour of your own familiar soil,
where all these years I saw you live and grow,
blossom and bear fruit, and spread your shade
while, in your green branches, joyous songbirds nested—
Fallen tree, forgotten forbear, uprooted
to make way for the merciless coldness of concrete—
your plight robs me of my breath.
I remember now my human ancestors,
uprooted, like you, from native soil,
by the concrete-hard harshness
of a land divided, under foreign rule,
displaced persons forced to find
new homes, on alien, unfamiliar soil—
in a different world, indifferent to the fate
of trees or men who stand in the way
of progress, the high road of history—
dispensable, left to live or die,
in a world where the climate has changed.
Fallen tree, your exposed roots lay bare
the callousness of our world, which destroys
trees, fish, birds, people, and our own ancestral roots,
to build in steel, concrete and plastic
its developing story of growth, even as it blindly
digs its own grave.
[From Subliminal: Poems, Hawakal, 2023]
Radha Chakravarty is a poet, critic and translator based in Delhi, India. Her new book of poetry, Subliminal: Poems, has recently been published by Hawakal. Her poems also appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including Journal of the Poetry Society of India, Contemporary Major Indian Women Poets, Narrow Road Journal, Soul Spaces, Culture Cult, The Poet (Lockdown 2020), Krishna in Indian Thought, Literature and Music and Indian Poetry through the Passage of Time. She has published over 20 books, including translations of major Bengali writers such as Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Kazi Nazrul Islam, anthologies of South Asian writing, and several critical monographs. She has co-edited The Essential Tagore (Harvard and Visva-Bharati), named Book of the Year 2011 by Martha Nussbaum. She contributed to Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem (Muse Pie Press, USA), nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2020. She was Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi.
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