Poetry | Chanchal Kumar

B.M. Barbeito

For Shirin

I try to interpret the messages from when we first met

To predict where it is that we will find ourselves at the beginning of dawn

I don't discover many conceits except that maybe

you are the clay bird-bath my old landlord once

Placed at the corner of the terrace wall & forgot all about it 

(For pigeons to cool themselves and drink from) 

I guess someone created you to watch over dilapidated medieval architecture- 

The queerest patron saint of k-pop and chai-points in the nooks of vijaynagar

Sometimes we walk till we reach the edge of our worlds

And there's nowhere left to go

Each person must either be a prison or an island

Always there exists a casus belli

The slightest hint of a century-old rain.

Blue flowers have sprouted quietly from the spots where our bodies have accidentally touched

You can't talk about poverty/poetry, you can only live it

I draw concentric circles to mark my possessions

You never admit to being in places other than your home.

An Autobiography

Mail trains have followed me to this place

Where I live as a paying guest,

Although I do not hand over currency notes

The first of every month.

I pay in a slow erosion of whatever is left

Of my faith. I have dug too much sand

Looking for seashells and tiny pearls:

I bring back home whatever I find.

Friends whom I do not understand

Keep visiting me, gesticulating and cheering

I sometimes wish they left soon

My relationships are painted

with the same hazy stripes, but

It doesn't fade even after a thousand washes

My love is the heat from brick-kilns

It creates only when it glows blue

People have made me wary of grand ideas,

all-enclosing ideologies. I do not use them,

I do not trust them.

I am writing my autobiography

With a shrunken vocabulary :

The words that recur are

caste, caste, caste.

About Lynching

Since I've just seen twenty-three years of life

I'd like to ask those who are older about facts regarding a certain important issue

I'd like to know when they were the same age as I am now,

Did they too witness a lull enveloping the streets

Just before another lynching was orchestrated?

Bruegel The Elder did paint a man drowning with others watching,

going leisurely around with their work,

Not paying heed. 

Is it the same when a chosen person is killed by an angry mob?

Raja Ravi Varma never used saffron colors to depict a Hindu god

baying for the blood of the innocent.

Surely, he was unlucky he never got the inspiration to depict the act on canvas?

I wish someone had written, just for reference-

"About lynching, they were never wrong, the Old Masters..."