‘What this minute needs is a deep breath’: Poems of restless freedom and urgent imperative of dreams

Soka: A Triptych

Elegy for a Dead Child
Karma Arambham

It wasn't my womb
that slid you out into the sun.
But for all of your earth-kneaded days
we have shared you son-like
your blooming to beauty
a constant song on our lips.

When your story plunged
into a denouement ere the first half
of our book we stopped writing
our ink refusing to run.
That your bowl of life was smaller
than ours scissors justice itself.

Your mother asks me her maternal
status – childless/barren/bereaved?
I write “child-marked” upon her palm.
Though relatives stayed long enough
to help her with tenses and convert
your “is” into “was” she refuses to learn.

Who holds you in the world beyond
she often wants to know. Her evenings
bare kerchiefs with you around
are now nine-yard bandages she lets
herself bleed in. Could things have been
otherwise? Where did she go wrong?

She asks me to taste the pudding
when there are guests. Having given up
all you loved she is trying to grow
concave so she will have space
to hold your emptiness. It's only
another gestation, she softly says.

But what leaves me more unsettled each time
is that memory of your father used to getting
you boxes of the best toys always
distractedly seeking
on that curfewed filigree afternoon
a box to safely put you in.

Beyond Mourning
Asthi Sweekaranam

Every time the sea ravaged me
and assaulted my faith
I made my way to the lapel of your coat
and found beneath its fold
a place to hide my shame.

Not that it mattered.
When you let go of the particulars
shame like nakedness means nothing.
It speaks only to absence
to that which should have been but is not.

The way his birthday went absent
from yesterday and...

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