TWO NARMADA POEMS

(I) Karnali Dec 2008

Though there isn’t much river here
I find my way
Out of the thatched sheds
Which cover the river bank
Dodging

The nauseating leftovers
Of death’s ritual dinner
Broken earthen pots
Shocking heaps of hair
Of shaved mourners
Women’s undergarments
With no women in them

No, I haven’t come here
To submerse my ashes
I am not completely cremated yet

Most of it is pale xanthous sand

This dried up river resembles
An old decrepit Hindu beggar woman
At the emigrations counter
She scrutinize my papers
For forgery
I have nothing to declare
Except my innings

You can’t cross borders
With your poems
She says

But I am a translator
I protest

You son of a bitch
She says with a toothless grin
And sparkle in her eyes
As she tears up my tourist visa
Into shreds

You bloody son of a bitch





(II)
Chandod
(For Dayaram 1777-1853)

It is over
Before I can make out anything
This small walk in the forest
Ends with an ambush
Of aliens
A mob of a million temples
Attack me
With their ugly whitewashed faces
Uglier than the whitewashed faith
That spawned them

I lost faith
Long time before
I lost my virginity
I don’t think I will recover
Either

I am taken
To the birth place of a medieval Gujarati saint-poet
It is an ill lit square room
With the poet’s poems and information
In the notice boards on the walls
It looks like an elementary school
In the village
The place where God’s most unpoetic creations are born
Is equally prosaic

The phrase `saint poet’ loiters aimlessly in my head
It is an oxymoron
Ambidextrous and androgynous
Every saint has a past
And every sinner has a future they say
But poets have neither

I chance upon a poem titled
` Love’s Satire’
In English translation
On the notice board

Got it pal I say
Got it
We have been doing it since ages


(4 December 2008)

When the Extinguished Sun goes to Sleep

When the extinguished sun goes to sleep
He spills his colourful semen on the touch screen sky
He still dreams of the harvest he has to reap

Syllables once erect and taut are now in a heap
The wet phrases that lubricated once are now dry
When the extinguished sun goes to sleep

Now the sleeping bats no longer leap
Sun has scribbled his will on the blog and is ready to die
He still dreams of the harvest he has to reap

Moon fakes her orgasm and pretends to weep
Stars pretend to be aroused in the pornographic sky
When the extinguished sun goes to sleep

The sun is the shepherd who likes to slaughter his sheep
The sheep yields to his digital knife without asking why
He still dreams of the harvest he has to reap

Mountains refuse to be tall and oceans refuse to be deep
The liquid crystal monitor refuses to be my sky
When the extinguished sun goes to sleep
He still dreams of the harvest he has to reap

Sachin Ketkar
4 Sept 2010

Sex, Coffee, Ontology

Sex is just a conversation
They say
I say
Not to you but you in my mind
let me take
your nakedness in my laps
enfold  you with the blanket
of my being

I say to you
Not to you in my mind
But to you
'Want to join me for a cup of coffee?'
You say
'Thanks,
Very nice of you. But some other time.'
I go and buy a cup
for myself
Coffee
is just a conversation
I hear them say.

16/10/10

Some Recent Qasidas on Pain

I

I raise my glass
To toast you, Pain

You are butterfly made of silver
Blooming in all sorts of places
A uranium rose
Whose sharp petals
Cut deep into all seven layers of flesh

II

You are language
I peel off the syntax and lexis
Of the legendary onion
Layer by layer

Till I am the only thing
That’s left

III

You are the daylight
Which keep
Men awake

IV

My being is your gynoecium
I gather
The pollen of death
From your hirsute feet

A poem is about to germinate


29 March 2011 11:31 pm

A Line of a Poem

Is hardly ever the shortest distance
Between two spaced points.
It is actually a misfortune of a sentence
To become a line of a poem.

Usually, it is doomed to incompletion
Disintegrate into fragments
That make no picture if put together again.

As your name means a line of a poem
I gather the fragments
Of the meanings of your name
In my faceless palms
To see how my line of Fate
Merges into your line of Destiny.

The small white butterflies
Of your scintillating laughter
Punctuate
The lines on the palms of my poems
Perching
on my unwritten commas
And full stops
Which are usually
Commencements of a new sentence.

I can only respire
My line of a poem
In my effort to escape
The rocky prison house of prose.
In front of my eyes
I see the sentences crumble
Into the fragments
Of irredeemable distances
The stoic sparrows
Peck at the common crumbs
Altercating over the words
In their insatiate beaks.


Thursday, July 22, 2004

Wait for Me

Like dried teak leaves
My eyes have come off

Bored crows people
The forsaken branches
Of my leafless fingers.

The sun has dropped his smooth round skull somewhere
On my treeless grounds.

I am waiting to grow into a great babul tree
In this wasteland
Where no sun grows on the trees.

My eyes gather near your feet
Blown by the barrenness of the winds.

Crows look at you
As if you are unwanted stranger.

Somewhere a monkey stares at you
And you do not know.

In the crowded thorny shrubs in my lungs
Hangs a no moon night
For
In the shifting sands of life
I have buried all my twelve moons.

My thousand eyes
Dry like leaves gathered around your feet
Blaze like the intestines of a deadpan earth.

The bored crows
Fly away into the soul
Of white inert sky.

The smooth round skull
Of the sun crumbles into dust.
I am waiting to die

Like this huge leafless baobab
On which the monkeys wait
For the fruit and a leaf.

Dust gathers on the tired tamarind tree
That has forgotten its own taste.

Dust gathers on the brown soil of my eyes.
Dust gathers on the round abandoned skulls of the sun.

Monkeys look emptily at the shadows
Of the crows which are no longer there.

Gather the ashes of my eyes in your palms.
Weep the tears blue as the earth
On the silence of my pyre.

Remember me as monkeys
Remember the fruits
When they are hungry
As the crows remember their mates
In summer. Remember me
As the leafless baobab
Flourishing on the tombs
Of the inhumed moon
Remember the rich green felicity of their leaves.
Wait for me where no one waits for anyone any longer.

My Mouth is an Old Useless Tunnel

My mouth is an old useless tunnel
In which the abandoned corroded railway tracks go in
But don’t come out.
You are the light at the end
Of my mouth.

My face is brittle like a mummy’s
When I try to take it off like a tedious mask
It falls into thousand pieces
On the floor.

Let me remove my hands from my elbows
And offer them to you in a dish full of oranges
And grapes.

I want to make a garland of my ten heads
Interwoven with sliced watermelons and pumpkins
For your neck.

Allow me to take out
The funeral procession of my brown eyes
And bury them
On your nipples.
I will wait for marigolds
To burst forth on their graves.