Meena Kandasamy Poems

two thousand years ago
our word for love
was the same.
...

My school bud, he work hard.
He slog. He make money.
He grow dam rich.
...

And both of us become strangers onto each other
Do not worry about me.

We will look beyond eyes and run into each other
As usual, for the rest of life.
...

I fancy myself being a witch.
Broomstick borne and black as pitch.
Thin, stark-naked and with fire for eyes.
Killing men whom I despise.
...

Teach him not to seek
Where he has been taught to find...
Lead him into the land
Of silences—Ignore his words of praise
...

Who? Who? Who?
Mahatma. Sorry no.
Truth. Non-violence.
Stop it. Enough taboo.
...

Leave your books behind.
Since memory,
Like knowledge, is a traitor,
Erase every hoarding of your horrible past.
...

her famished tongue feasted on dreams
and she catered to its cravings—
green mangoes clay cloying chalk
citrus soap crusty coal raw rice
...

I speak alone because
I do not know his answers.

And yet, you want to be heard.

I want to tell him that I have
Closed and sealed my skin.
...

And you see the two-crows-for-joy-pass that are sitting on
overhead cables and the evening moon,
a mere silvery slice against fluffy translucent sky.

And the remains of your school where you spent your twelve
longest years and lived through everything.

And the bus-stand you had to draw for your art-class in yellow
ochre or asphalt grey and the emptiness that now occupies the
place where a tiny café once stood.

And the tree where they fed you lunch before you learnt to walk
back home. And I thought of my parents.

Brilliant people talking of the intricacies of their life and the corruption of
morals and the bygone days and hunger in their childhood and their deaddear-
departed parents as if to teach you what to talk to your children.

(And you are their child,
so you speak their lines.)
Still returning home,

And there are rusty mammoth girders that outline the sky like
the derelicts of lost dreams and crossed hopes.

And girls so flimsy pretty yet unsafe in the little worlds of lip
gloss and love affairs that you could have smoked them into
oblivion.

And the dry decaying dead leaves crushed with varying noises
and carrying a spent smell that clings to your hair.

And the shy forest noises that violate your fixation over sight
and sound and smell and touch yes touch.

And I thought of my lover.

A primitive man who would invade
your aloneness on insomniac nights
and challenge your assumptions of
love and your sophistications and fill
your ears with the four letter words of
his ancient language that have begun
to sound to you like earth songs to
which your body awakens.

(And you are his love,
so you listen to his lines.)

On the way home, the small
lessons you learn of life. . .
Love, or the promise of love,
its lack of choice.
This large world.
And its littleness.
...