Tag: Ethos

Categories
Excerpt Poetry

Poems from Rituals

By Kiriti Sengupta

A Place Like Home

Lights turned off,

three glasses retire

as the bar closes.

The first stands upright,

the other upside down,

another lies horizontal.

.

For last few hours

the crystals held liquor,

ice, scent and comfort.

They also witnessed

eyes that spoke volumes

while lashes refused

to flutter.

.

The pub reopens

the next day

to the riff of unrest.

.

Observance

1

Visitors, who checked in 

to see my father post-surgery, 

appeared stressed.

After his discharge several came home.

Eyes moistened, they wished him Godspeed.

All of us except Baba knew… 

Ma informed him months later.

.

No one pays a call anymore. 

Three decades…

2

Tittle-tattle halts.

The mother waves a goodbye

as the school bus sets off.

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Both these poems are excerpted from Kiriti Sengupta’s collection, Rituals (March 2019, Hawkal Publishers), with permission from the author

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Kiriti Sengupta is a poet, editor, translator, and publisher from Calcutta. He is the recipient of the 2018 Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize for his contribution to literature. He has published eleven books of poetry and prose and two books of translation and co-edited five anthologies. Sengupta is the chief editor of the Ethos Literary Journal.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL. 

Categories
Poetry

Rasam and Sunil the Brahmin

By Marc Nair

Rasam for Grandma (1926–2017) In her last hours, birdlike, heaves of brittle breath flutter like grace notes in a sodden sonata. A bursting heart shudders under this slip of skin. Nothing made of words drips into evening. Her mouth a soundless nave, mind a widened sieve, eyes a dim room of racing monitors, diodes that map a flailing terrain held by the memory of daughters, women now; strange women of quibbling hours, who rock her with distant tears. She does not know who she sees; no thing of memory remains, not in muscle or breath, not in the taste of rasam lost beyond her tongue, thin spices souring over years of simmering in a dusty kitchen, morning sun ageing the linoleum, a ‘For Sale’ sign growing in the yard. Sunil the Brahmin Just keep following the heart-lines on your hand Florence and the Machine He would read me the truth of words spliced by the lines on my hand, in fisted heartbeats of callused stories. His own thumbs will not bend; steeled by a certain inflexibility to step from the haveli of his fathers into this pulsing world, sheared by jagged roofs and backpackers. The valves of his blue-daubed house open and close their doors with older sight, blood etched from the lineage on his palm; a history of Brahmins as soothsayers, the holy lines on their head clear as the need for a city’s arteries to flow, a sure pump of wisdom that foiled uprisings. They walked for centuries in the fault lines of kings, telling of fame and famine, although Sunil speaks to me in smaller worlds: of my own love-lines split like Jodhpur’s road winding from the unconquered fort, as my palm reveals its map of the maker’s blade, the unfinished road pressed against my heart.

( First published in Vital Possessions, Ethos Books, 2018)

( First published in Postal Code, Red Wheelbarrow Books, 2013)

Marc Nair is a poet who works at the intersection of various art forms. He is currently pursuing projects that involve photography, movement and creative non-fiction. His work revolves around the ironies and idiosyncrasies of everyday life. He has published ten collections of poetry.