New | Poetry | Jobeth Warjri

                                                              

Photo: Arshi Zama

When the Coffee Table is the Only Thing That’s Stationary

The only difference between us

is that you live in a house whose tentacles

I have coveted and wished to make my own

 

I break commandments 10/10 to avoid feeling lonely

stow away the broken parts among my clothes

then blame my mother for her audacity to glue

 

them back together into something sensible:

a heavy downpour during the monsoon, maybe.

Sometimes, a face stares out from the arterial roads

 

of a mirror above the bathroom sink

I choose to keep my head down for fear of what

might greet me through the countenance of possible futures

 

I nurture their unsightly stems in white pots

cast a fishing line into their rippling waters…

I look to my cats for the wisdom of living in the moment.

 

Permanence is something I cling to, in my own way:

I plant my feet across from you on our coffee table

 

with my back resting against a shaky plastic chair.

 

 

Absences

It is not that the curtains miss

the hand that pulls them apart

or the rim of a cup the

lips that drink its content

 

It is not that there is a depressed

space on the bed where the cat sleeps

or that the laundry folds in awkward

positions than what it is used to

 

It is this and so much more—

the rearrangement of thought, of body

around a territory filled with only air

the counting of things as they should be

 

the strangeness of what was home.

 

The Quiet

(for the women in Manipur)

You need to be quiet in order to write.

You need to hold the pauses between breaths

and exploit them for what you know they do not say

poetry is breathing when the musician plays a note

that just about touches the threshold of sound

and, in so doing, awakens the mind to silence.

 

 

Today, a woman mourns for her daughter.

You just about catch the wind in her cry

enough to hesitate calling it poetry.

 

The Nation is a Construct

It’s about the Spirit and in whose body it resides

I know this because father said so

 

our hands clasped together after fumbling

for words through onion-skin pages

 

we learned of Abraham whose descendants now

etch streaks across the desert to contain their souls

 

then I met you and thought, for a moment, how you

and yours proclaimed freedom over lands

 

within the borders of a woman whose

milk tasted of bitter turmeric and spices

 

you called her MATA, elsewhere an

acronym for keeping out undesirables

 

I dreamt of the progenitors of this law,

white and absolute in their claims to rule

 

so I asked who is this for: the earth,

the sky, the seas, the soil on which I stand?

 

maybe, being mortals, we place

limits to what is actually eternal.

 

The Paradox of Nothingness

To write about it would mean

to give to it what it is not:            

the magic swirl of letters across

a page that swallows universes

the many loops that mean only to

hang tender adjectives through a hole.

 

The Japanese have turned it

into an art eating under

pink blossoms that, decades

ago, adorned fighter jets.

These same petals shroud our air,

makes the quiet between us riotous.

 

We watch children release

its helium-filled symbols

into a dispassionate, blue sheet;

their curly lines receding into wind. 

While biographers among us arrest its

sense over and over with black ink.

 

We grow inarticulate

trying to capture its mood

among a singer’s lyric, claiming

her intonations as our own:

in the backseat of a car, her

heartaches are hers no longer.

 

Maybe, we could solve

its arithmetic by drawing 0s

where our breath should be

only that would imply life

imperilled though it may be

to the soul of a poem

 

that says and means nothing.