Raining Raag Shudh Kalyan

The sky is lit up by blue lightning
flowers of insurrections.
Dark-brown golden clouds suddenly
burst over the parched sea burning
with the salt of my youth.
Breathless, I dig remains of burnt
syllables of her language
retreat into the hidden juke box.
Why is the land of priests and prophets busy
settling stone-age disputes in poetry?
There is nothing left of ancient prejudice –
The earth is covered with vermillion.
Huddled around the lanterns of sorrows, the ageing
spring and autumn
shyly mate in my wounded eyelids –
a restless, rebellious melody softly disappears into
pear and coral bodies of memories.
What makes her wait?
I am filled with desires but have no experience in love.
My old town slowly sinks in the river of blood
meandering through the famished rice fields.
And I grieve like the fragrant camphor in raag Shudh Kalyan
What could I give her after this if I were you?

Childhood, An Arbitrary Linguistic Sign of Memory?

Who says mushrooms are poisonous?
I realised early in my childhood
I speak only dialects with particular

attention to my private parts, recreational fantasy for saints and sinners.
I dream –

I peel my dark freckles like the
vicissitudes of hunting grasshoppers in a cobbled street.
I close my eyes and see
mother is in the tulip fields, and
my nine siblings slowly vanishing beyond a sea, another sea.

I invite her to Iftar party, lift her veil
inhale her silence, coppery fragrance of ripe plums.
After a further silence
she kisses my speaking lips
vibrating with moon-rinsed Friday prayers.

She insists on choking our hookah-shaped
bodies with honey and tobacco.
I lean on her wild breasts and lick her childhood –
naked, unshaded cactus flower in smoky mayhem.

How strange
it tastes like the raw meat of our shadows in love.
I again dream –

I hear cries of children shot dead for
trying to play bamboo mandolin in the desert.
I weep through the wounded ink-light night for my roots

And the wheat stops growing in her veins.

I am sure

I will be convicted for her sudden disappearance.
The next day
My wish is granted.
She becomes a mushroom.
Is childhood an arbitrary linguistic sign of memory?

Schizophrenic Maroon Lipstick

In the mid-night sun, she turns into a wild stone.
I jump naked into her body –
Swim at the bottom of the sea, and paint her breast with my favourite
Schizophrenic maroon lipstick.
I like the taste of her saliva
Smelling like the starving bodies of organ donors.
Prophets curtain their windows and confront me
Writing new religious laws on her brazen lips.
“Why is it you never go on pilgrimage”, she asks
All places in her body are sacred barring her breast –
“translating desire in the holy language is a sin”, she tells me.
I see dark brown birds disappearing in her navel
Mirroring my vernacular poems.
Who am I now?
How can I pronounce her name?
Is it really a triumph of memory or silence?
A rabbit is sitting at the ledge of the new moon –
the sky slowly splinters into pink, purple and blue colours.
I again start painting her breast with my favourite
Schizophrenic maroon lipstick…

Love at Labor Day

Here it is, you and me.
Between your lips and my lips grows seasons of suffering –
a new prophecy for our proletarian fantasies.
There is nothing crude or callous here –
I am wounded, you are wounded.
Everything is a mechanical arousal – death, loss, even fear.
Disclosing histories of missing persons in prisons
she undresses herself in a peninsular rage –
a fire rages in her electrocuted body
high-end charcoal-colored tower of opulence.
Raw, unfiltered disaffection spreads all over –
the lands of poets and painters slowly turn barren, and
clowns in strapless nightgowns poison roaming cannibals.

Everything is red –

Red dolls, red grapes, red cotton fields.
It is the beginning of madness –
Unwrapped dead bodies weep in the salted-sunlight.
Is there any music in the age of renaissance and revenge?
The urge to enslave human flesh is blind, and sinister.
She closes her eyes,
digs her painted nails into his matte-finished torso –
we ferment in the missionary position like monks seeking
escape from the green-gold ascetic desires.

He navigates her forbidden aboriginal curves, and
Her nickel-plated thighs pulsate like copper leaves in winter rains.
The invisible evening light is turning grey and agnostic –
Why is this that a poem is never addressed to me?
A surge of silk-satin ecstasy erupts –
sweaty, dizzy and melancholic relic of a bygone era of oppression.
In one last act of the Labour Day celebration, she
smashes my body with rusted sickle and
I fall asleep in her steamy hot throat
filled with luggage and language of her secret working-class life!

Village Without Lanterns
(In memory of poet Mangalesh Dabral)

In my village
There are no lanterns in the temples or mosques –
We offer prayers in stained-daylight.
Eyes filled with sand and sunset
Women walk through the charred paddy fields
breastfeed frogs their tears.
Neither you know nor I know
Why apples and apricots have gone sour.
Don’t ask me why
Hyenas and foxes have deserted my village.
Now you know
Why I prefer to speak without their tongues.
Once again, moonlit-harvest night burns and I
Wait for my son on the only
Stone bridge at the edge of my memory.

Ashwani Kumar is a poet, writer and professor in Mumbai. Widely published, anthologised and translated into several Indian and foreign languages, his most recent book is Scent of Rain: Remembering Jayanta Mahapatra (Red River, 2024) and his forthcoming book is titled Map of Memories.