Self-Portrait as Ocean Bed
I am afraid of such nights,
dimming skies burrowing like an open wound.
I never know how this happens, this
transformation of self, mud-soaked, tainted,
stained with green beads, sea plants, fists of grassy shards
of time hollowed in the belly of an ocean.
I lie, drowned and flattened in the spread,
water above. A deep longing beneath
batters the senses into surrender.
There is life. There is an unknown darkness
brushing by, like the strokes of a ravaged
remembrance. I am refaced again.
I know nothing other than the shelled pearls,
schools of mustardfish, a wavering mass
of creatures and wonder, all in the
galloping waves, bruising and healing,
stilling and parting, like the shattered
crystal pieces of love lost.
Mermaid Myths, Reconstructed
Mami Wata, the African Mermaid
Goddess of the Afer waters, she nourishes
the shringaar-green offspring of nature
spread over the blue frescoes of seabed.
She arises the saviour, the mother in the cusp
of bluish-green Shakti, and reclaims the identity
of her children with diamonds embossed
in their charcoal skin.
She arises as light, as storm, the divine destination
of the sacred seas, towards resurrection,
towards the satori, incandescence.
Suvanamachha, the Asian Mermaid
The golden mermaid from the oceans of Siam,
with glistening glitter in her eyes,
blesses the universe with a gilded fortune of flight.
A figurine from the precinct of Ramayana,
her pure love springs with Hanuman.
She flowers harmony amid the ocean folk
and sweeps away the bottled-up morose
as a healing, embalming path towards faith.
Merrow, the Irish Mermaid
Her foamy, fertile tresses
are aureoled as spring.
Green twirl inside the waters
of Inis Fáil, serene.
She rummages through tidal harsh
to delve in the halo within.
Selkie, the Scottish Mermaid
From the lap of the lavish, riverine land of Scots,
she appears – half-seal, half human – transforming
like the variegated hues of a kaleidoscope.
The Gaelic maighdean mhara fills the darkened spaces
of mucky ravines with a bouquet of wonder and hope.
Melusine, the Medieval European Mermaid
She reaches the shore as vengeance,
like wrath of Kali in ruddy ire.
Yet she appears in dreams, scaling winged
fantasies in the gossamer flurries
of imaginations.
With a serpent tail and free pinions of pride,
she breathes of emancipation,
the untameable, invincible strength
of liberation
Gestalt of Memories
It never deceives the cognition of yearning,
churning in the sulphur empires of the soul,
grizzled on the grassy lawn of memories –
green, charcoaled, tarred.
It happens on days like these, when the air
is the aftertaste of rain, the sky – chunks of
sandalwood, and the heart – a museum of
unavoidable pain evoked in a cluster of feeling.
Raw, raw, like the sudden sputter of blistering rain,
memories scatter in unknown, angular slants of light.
They are broken into uncountable pieces – beloyari,
glass – like yet they join to fill in the dry ocean within,
to combine, in their wholesome integrity,
to chart the iridescent susception of heart,
to fill the parched topology with softening
touch of warmth, this endless resfeber,
this converging path of the body, mind, heart –
journeying, journeying.
At Haridwar Ghat
It was fulgent, the whole of the place.
The day was Dussehra, and there was celebration of goodness triumphing.
They say that this day is for the burning of evil, the wiping out of any
maligned megrima – joyous victory, a renaissance, a resurrection.
My sister and I stand at the narrow edge of the ghat, the shade
as saving grace for us from all the loudness. The elders sip chai nearby,
recall age-old history, restless in a forlorn sense, even amid these –
lurid lights and – boisterous bursts of firecrackers –
that gambol like large fireflies,
that hover around us.
We gradually come to sit by the sea, our bodies ever closer to it,
its eternal regurgitating, its carrying away of tattered wastes
in bits and pieces.
Still as a distant sight, we watch the fire, the burning baring all,
the glow rising like an inexorable spring. A kindled diya comes floating
through the skimming Ganges, reaches all the way to us. My sister
picks it up from the scrim of water, adores it with her slender, pink
fingers and palm, then places it back within the dark, viscous waves.
And that day, it was almost as if this tiny glimpse was a great
revelation eclipsed in a span of time – of how our lives and ribs
would eventually shape, burning and dousing, taking in all the warmth,
only to give back, in the end, to the silence –
of the river,
the ocean,
the sea.
S Rupsha Mitra’s writings have appeared in the Sahitya Akademi, The Kali Anthology: Poems by Indian Women Poets, Muse India, and elsewhere.
Excerpted with permission from Smoked Frames, S Rupsha Mitra, JLRB Press.