‘I slough off my body and wander / into faithless verses’: Memory and nature meet in these poems

Brown God’s Child

My Gods are forest dwellers,
their skin marked in burnt caramel
of the tropical sun.
On Amavasya nights
they feast on flame-torched cassava
and salted mackerel.

Sounds in my language
are symbols of dark and light,
half Sanskrit -half Dravidian,
colour of the sea, the smell of ripe paddy.
Don’t speak your tongue
they are blood clots, I am cautioned early on –

discordant as though pebbles rattling
in a box. Once, in the closed space
of an elevator, I turned into shifting sands.The girl beside me shuddered
as though the moon had wept
from empty madness. Your hair is a mass

of tangled roots and coiled secrets
of equinox, says Autumn. Come night,
I slough off my body and wander
into faithless verses.

Elegy

We dug a hole in the river’s heart
till our dreams inundated
the fishing village.

We burned the woods and clouds
till the landslides came rolling down
the roofs stacked high.

When it wasn’t enough,
we filled the ocean with sand,
now we became Gods.

We dusted the guilt off our backs
and flossed the moss lodged
in our mouths.

When it wasn’t enough,
we wrote an elegy for the Earth.

Harvest

I dye my hair in the thickening
monsoon cloud, crimson hibiscus
plucked from the lyrics bordering our
island, from the law of tides
countless leaves of wild mussanda
singing anthems in caverns of death,
raisins nesting dark spells of
still life, smell of a viper’s nest,
sunbeams falling on raised graves,
coconut oil smoked in indigo.

Bathing in the lotus pond
of my ruins, I waterbirth a moon,
my thighs splayed in faith,
chrysanthemums mourning.
Once my...

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