New | Poetry | For the Dark Times | Hamraaz

Reel for Delhi in Springtime

When I tell you what it means 

to me to live in Delhi,

I won’t use trending music

or a dozen flashing photos

approved by the Ministry

of Tourism—

just a few words 

to conjure images—

that pair of young women 

brushing shoulders 

as they sip tea on the edge 

of the dusty maidan—

or the thin, strong man

in the next lane over

who right now

is stripping off his shirt 

as he assesses a growing 

pool of stinking water—

and on a good day,

this might be enough

to get you to consider 

one or two simple ideas:

we can remake this world;

we can, and we must, my friends.

Abolish the Delhi Police

-for Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita

Maybe it’s just habit,

but even all these months after

they locked down the city

and took away friends of your friends,

sometimes you still float away 

at that moment when light’s fading 

and the first bats are flying;

and when you wake with a start

it is already dark—

you’re not sure where you are,

but you hear the door bang—

and then you’re relieved 

to find it’s a friend 

who wants to play cards—

or the newspaper man,

bringing the bill—

not someone who’s come

to take you away:

we don’t need police,

they spread only fear.

Gently

You cradle the purring cat 

like your mother cradled you 

in the old photo 

you keep by your bed—

you know the cat 

is not a child,

and neither are you,

but often in April,

as the ceiling fan 

gently spins you,

you remember her 

tender hands.

Questions I Don’t Need to Ask

Do you struggle against 

the deepening dark

because you read 

Marx or Ambedkar?

Or was it the bus 

driver who leered

and hissed in your ear,

or the teacher who failed you,

or the neighbors who 

forced you to say, 

‘Everything is fine’?

Or was the way 

the world treated your parents—

or was it the way 

they still loved you?

Excess Demands 

(or Why Such a Shortage of Justice?)

Do not call us terrorists

for protesting bad laws,

or jail us for laughing 

at gods or Amit Shah.

Let us love those we love;

don’t tell us how to pray;

and when we do equal work,

give us equal pay.

In jail, grant us straws,

if we tremble when we drink—

warm blankets when it’s cold,

and books so we can think.

Do not molest us or beat us

(in jail or in undisclosed locations

before you take us to jail.)

Do not torture us in any way:

no broken bones or bruises,

no solitary confinement;

we need space and time to sleep,

water and soap to wash.

Tell our families where we are.

Do not take us in the night

to a field or flyover,

and then shoot us before our trial.

Do not shoot us in broad daylight

and then call us terrorists.

New | Poetry | Dale Cottingham

Claude Monet - The Magpie (wikimedia commons)

 

This Icy In-Between

 

                                                This evening, during the blizzard, on my way

to check on you, while snow fell in streaks,

 

horizontal and quick, driven by wind

in utter fidelity to the current, blurring my view

 

of the dirt road I drove slowly down—

guided by a solitary light on a hill’s low crest.

 

The light shone like an outpost, its dome

illuminating in blue light the snow, each flake

 

not specific, but in mass, a slur glittering

in their hurry, as the CD I played,

 

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings,

reached the long crescendo, violins

 

moving up the register without interruption,

voicing my emptiness, leaving me

 

gapped and torn, edging along a precipice,

in a blizzard of unspoken words.

 

But I can’t say that was all.

I can’t say it was only snow,

 

I can’t say if it was longing

or the adagio I felt,

 

my car slipping on unseen ice, that I

must navigate, turning the steering wheel

 

counter to my slide, but carefully,

the crescendo ongoing, the precipice

 

threatening, or tempting. Snowflake

of my soul, coursing on currents.

 

I’ve blown through money and time;

borrowed prayers, faith, gestures,

 

glances, and some blues I’ve sung.

Aren’t I both subject and object

 

on this road? The crescendo

cascading now, descending

 

                                                to one more sorrowful resolution,

                                                the snow still falling scouring

 

the icy road, some piling in the ditch,

                                                some on field

 

beyond the blue of my sight,

like souls I’ve seen but not touched,

                                               

while you wait, knowing

I’m in this icy in-between,

 

                                                that I strive while you wait anxiously,

you sitting in your chair,

 

phone, remote, Bible at hand.

O, prayer of my heart,

 

let my spoken and unspoken words

                                                be enough, my arrival in a blizzard

 

saying everything necessary, offering

                                                a slippery concept, what I call me.  

 

 

 

A Little History

 

                                                Watching the river in flood,

each exhale huffing over the one before,

its red, swollen reality waking imagination.

 

Dismembered tree limbs,

                                                water logged, sodden, submerging, 

re-emerging for encores of helplessness,

 

tumbling in the roiling flow.

A tire, worn and wet, rolling in the current,

upright, overturning, swerving

 

in free-fall downstream,

to a fate I can’t see.

From my perch, I read

 

my family history, part native American

forcibly removed from their homeland

in a torrent of movement,

 

and sitting apart, part White

settled here from somewhere else,

each an immigrant trying

 

to swim amid the flotsam

in a swirl of meanings

jostled by the flood

 

each with a history as I pass through  

like a ghost as I live my own,

that teeters on being swept away

 

in this torrent of time, events,

each iteration combining

into a larger one, gaining 

 

a force of meaning, emotion—

what will I remember

from this pause on my walk?

Will this be one focused moment

in a series of unplumbed events,

swept away with other debris,

 

or will I glean new insight, leaving

with the memory of sun lighting

a storm’s watery aftermath,

 

the power in this most fluid element,

my synapses sparking as I watch,

seeing branches, trash bags, silt anew,

 

as they course by, submerged,

like my ancestors to different degrees

in the turgid flow, some afloat,

 

some drowning as I watch, none

I can save from the churning river—

the willow on the bank, caught in the flow,

 

clinging by roots as the scourging flood

scours the soil, the willow still grasping,

with each billow less able to stand—

 

leaning, so that even if it holds 

amid the change, it is changed,

and will not remain unchanged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Home Ground

 

                                                The ground rises before me,

fallow and open, ghosted

 

by my ancestors, both Native

and White , last year’s stalks,

 

dirt-spattered and weathered

by snow, by frost,

 

                                                corn husks once luscious and florid,

that rose in summer sun,

 

prone, picked over

by birds, like readers

 

seeking stray kernels

in the scribbled margins

 

of second-hand books.

The wind ribbons through,

 

                                                fecund, bearing pollen, spores,

humid enlightenments,

 

                                                the expectation of rain.           

A lone car passes, heading to town,

 

whose far warrens

of urban entertainments

 

of the body and mind,

hold no attraction for me.

 

                                                Hoe in hand, I seek a soulful way.

As the car crosses over the next hill,

 

                                                rolling dust over the empty plains,

                                                I can’t say that I am more than breath,

 

                                                as I scrape metal against pliable earth,

                                                sensing the always-feeling-an-absence

 

                                                present, the sehnsucht,

despite the presence of so much:

 

dust, roots, spores, humidity—

I stand at the field’s edge,

 

                                                gawping as if a ghostly pageant

passed by, the wind persisting,

 

shuddering the dry stalks,

                                                this dust, this solitude,

 

my angle of repose,

                                                this odd jealously rising,

 

                                                my ancestors immigrants too,

never close enough to the land—

 

                                                It is an other, it is other,

as I carve furrows

                                               

in this land I stand on,

                                                whose grit collects on me,

 

as I attempt to translate

the wind’s soulful whispering

 

to earth, which seems

to understand in ways I can’t.

                                                                                   

 

 

 

 

                                                The Joining

 

                                                Listening to the piano, each note

joining the next, precise, and expanding,

 

soothing with melody, lifting us,

while she played Appalachian Spring,

 

                                                in this widening illusion. I watched her

                                                from half way back, playing

 

without sheet music,

song filling the sanctuary, her fingers

 

flawlessly striking keys, sharps, flats,

following Copeland’s score,

 

                                                but adding her own supple emphases,

                                                softness-es, delays—she leaned

 

into the keys, then swayed back,

eyes closed as if in prayer,

 

                                                pouring herself like champagne

into the music—no,

 

the sunlit music effervesced

through her, thrilling our ears,

 

resonating through pews,

                                                notes rising, falling like breath,

 

the notes rising, falling like breath,

singing me so thoroughly, I didn’t see

 

the others waiting for the wedding to start,

listening to her impromptu performance,

 

the notes continuing, gaining,

then losing intensity.

 

I lean my head back, my silent voice

reaching to meet her. Can’t I be

 

both subject and object—nuances

and lilts—chances taken,

 

or fates? Notes lofting, then

losing intensity. How can I deliver

 

my self from my individual will,

from outside this moment, free of need?

 

Each note in its little jacket of tone,

a mix of script and impromptu play,

 

my eyes on her, her eyes still closed,

head back, but leaning into the piano,

 

not one note lost, the music wafting

and waning—and henceforth,

 

wafting—my body turned medium,

the music lifting me,

 

lifting me as if my redemption

depends on it.