Author: Minakhi Misra

A good chance I will die alone.
A good chance I will die unknown.
A good chance all my poems die.
No head of Orpheus will sigh.
No tombstone epigram will say:
He wrote a poem everyday.
I know there is no happy end.
I trust you with my art, my friend.

My mother sees me gardening
And knows the reason I’m there:
The claypot with his ashen bones
Is somewhere near the jasmine roots.

My mother sees me with his watch
And knows the reason I’m there:
The lonely ticking second hand
Is keeping tempo of my dreams.

My mother sees me shine his shoes
And knows the reason I’m there:
The leather is still splitting out
To fit my unaccustomed feet.

When mind’s a pharmaceutic fog,
When sleep’s the most productive task,
Recovery, the project sprint,
A poem seems a massive ask.

And yet, it takes a single word,
A single phrase, a single line,
For fogs to gently dissipate
And wakefulness to gently shine.

That time I hurt my ear so hard,
The doctor told me Silence sounds
A little different to everyone.

The thing we hear when nothing sounds
Is how our body sounds to us.
So, Silence means we hear ourselves.

The Shaolin monks would nod to that,
And maybe jocks in water tanks,
The ones who’ve taken blows to ears,

And maybe those, like me, in beds
Recovering from accidents,
And med-retired patriots,

And those with Lyme and Ménière’s,
And dozen other named defects,
Who hear themselves always abuzz.

When Silence stops being silent us,
Becoming quite a violent us,
Are we who we were used to be?

Do I rebel so constantly
Against this newly ringing me?

So, every time I fear my fears,
Remind me – This is why I’m here:
The things I really need to know
Are in a place I dread to go.

And when I’m bored of boredom’s years,
Remind me – This is why I’m here:
The things I really need to do
Cannot be done in month or two.

They justify among themselves
Their unrequited love for God:
They love because they know they can,
And will is easier than won’t;
They do their prayer parties ’cause
To do is easier than don’t;
For what will fill the emptiness
When emptied of His emptiness?

In talking to a younger me,
I realised how far I’ve come,
And how the journey of these years
Has made me unempathetic
To those who yet have not begun.
Forgotten are anxieties
That paralysed my every step.
Forgotten, disappointments faced
If, at all, I took a step.
I’m so so far from where I was.
And yet, and yet, I am so so far
From where I want to be at last.
You’ve got to love the journey, sis,
Despite the humps that break our cars.

My air-conditioned valley view
Of sunny, shady, sunny greens,
Creates a flickered fantascope
Across our windshield, which careens
Away from screaming motorbikes
That have no time for scenic scenes.
No more does Mother want to wait
To watch me watch my clicking screens
Which try and fail to capture hills
Against the blurring biker teens.

Preposterous? I do not see
Advantages of long careers –
Long I have no longer got,
And debts I have, and long arrears
Raised against my long neglect
Of roles my pity volunteers
Not accounting if, for long,
My work belongs where work appears.

If short I shall be, short is clear.
No longer will I heed or hear
The ones who are not near nor dear
And yet are keen to interfere.

If short I shall be, short is cheer.
No longer will I live austere,
Nor no longer wear veneer,
If I do not feel sincere.

If short I shall be, short is freer.
No longer am I Engineer,
Nor no longer Marketeer,
Nor no kind of Profiteer,
Just someone who will appear
Every time his souvenir
Opens to an open ear.

If short I shall be, short is here.

A letter has to volunteer
To start a poem on a page,
And bid the other letters come
To stand with her upon her stage.

And then they must committees form
Of words – of nouns and verbs and such –
And meet in lines that break somewhere,
Unheeding of the space so much.

And then the lines must cast a vote
With operatic chorus ayes,
And hope that they are not the one
On which the Reader rolls her eyes.

And even if they pass the buck
Of Reader’s eyes from top to end,
They must do more between themselves
To be a worthy poem penned.

The only way’s to play and play
To different musics every day,
And come for all rehearsals dressed
In hopes of being the show today.