Poems | Michael Creighton

Artwork: Balbir Krishan,

Dream of my life, mix media on paper, 2008

1. Dadri Blues

They say the mutton’s beyond belief in Dadri—

but friend, I hear you’ll die for the beef in Dadri.

A burning cross broadcasts the news where I’m from;

the temple PA delivers the brief in Dadri.

A man’s dragged from his home and slain in the street;

‘We’ll test for beef,’ says the police chief in Dadri.

The PM poses with Zuckerberg in Cali;

a family sits, alone with their grief, in Dadri.

‘Accidents happen when feelings get hurt,’ they tell us—

but a lynching’s a lynching; nobody’s naïve in Dadri.

How does a place turn metaphor? Babri—

Godhra—Muzaffarnagar—now breathe in ‘Dadri’.

Zafar, my barber, cries, ‘Michael, they’re saying

people like us, may as well leave Dadri.’

2. Advice

Something is happening--

a hawker is hawking his wares, perhaps,

or a friend is announcing a feeling

of great weight.

Step back, look and listen:

you may hear a crow calling,

or see a dog drowsing on the side

of a dusty road. This one is short,

but there is always room

for a simile: straightforward,

like a mirror hung slightly askance;

or unexpected, like a green guava

gone bad from the inside out.

Focus now, we are nearly halfway there—

look hard at the hawker again, or the friend,

and uncover some small surprise;

how his cycle wobbles

as he rides to the next market,

or a word or two she says

that can be understood

in more than one way,

like that green guava up there

or the dust that hangs over the road

running next to the lazy dog.

If we’re lucky, we might arrive

at a deeper understanding

of the world and our place in it;

this insight would almost certainly involve

something familiar: God or love;

betrayal or trust;

joy, doubt, or death.

In the end, most of us till the same earth,

the only difference being the shape

and size of our ploughs

and how our hands feel

as we lift the loose soil.

3. Fog

Do not be fooled: that image you hope will point

to love or grief can never do all that you ask of it—

the dust-covered rose distracts from the mutable sky,

the discordant grass, and the roil and stir

of the eggs and toast you ate for breakfast—

to say nothing of the heavy past—

but before you blame the dust or the rose,

or even the unmentioned rotting guava,

consider the words themselves

and whether they can ever reliably signify

what we say we hope they will say;

does the name we give to the rose

really conjure a rose—

and if it does, which and whose

imagined rose is it?

And what of our need to map the chaos

that whirls around us and in us?

Beginning/

Middle/

Ending

is another kind of lie and all you need to do

is think about it and you will see the problem:

the Handsome Prince’s bad breath;

Cinderella’s lifelong fear of abandonment;

the wolf lurking in the woods outside the palace.

Can literary cartography contain or explain

even one moment in a real lived life?

Not completely, you may agree.

But dig deeper: who are you to make

that or any other stable judgment—

a painter will tell you perspective

is just a form of persuasion—

the size of the sprawled savior’s head,

his wounded feet and wrists.

And deeper still: who are you?

A product of your upbringing and experiences, you say;

but ‘product’ suggests a finished thing and though you will concede

that none of us are finished,

even the idea that we grow from seed to bloom

in an ordered way is a deception;

don’t we slip and churn into new forms

depending on whether our eyes linger

on the rose, the dust, or the grass;

whether we break our fast on eggs and toast

or left over aloo paratha;

whether we are viewed as the Prince,

the Princess or the Wolf as we walk

down crowded city streets?

Maybe it's hopeless,

but we could muddle mapless

from somewhere to wherever,

encountering things that make no sense,

like the world we live in:

strangers discussing shellfish in Leviticus

in a discount department store formerly known as-

while sorting through socks made in a country

formerly known as-

listening to a song written by an artist

formerly known as ‘the artist formerly known as-’

or maybe we’ll turn you into an I and later a we,

to suggest the slipperiness of identity—

or maybe I’ll just say it:

the opinions expressed herein are solely those of the narrator,

who may or may not be the poet,

who may or may not be a poet or even a teacher licensed

by the Teachers’ Standards and Practices Commission

in this or any other known jurisdiction,

or maybe we could just make words rub

up against each other in a way that plays

a different melody to anyone lucky enough to hear them:

Friend, if you boggle and fog my trousers in a fruity pan,

I will hold you in standard regard for a cookie

or at least for a breath of mint.