Native Place Poem by Rochelle Potkar

Goa is a leitmotif of childhood May holidays
A quartet of perspiring aunts cirlicuing their liquid syllables

Small washed rooms opening to orchestras of husk and coir
from attics and lofts
A sonnet of rain over maroon steps, stone sofas, and green weeping windows
sandy-grained backyard ghazals of jackfruit, guava, and mango trees

Catholic castes and Majorda beach-returnees behind gossiping grandmothers and aunts
(my mother was called scientist, an elder cousin-tourist, a single uncle-bebdo, a widowed aunt, ankwaar kodi)

A free verse of carved wedding fish of an aunt's yesteryear wedding near a muddy déjà vu-ed water well.

An unripe mango, oozing blatant growing up languages in ballads of arresting tongues.

Owria, Mario, Maria - the neighbor's children
Who could walk fast and long through paddy fields, uneven roads without a muscle tear.

Goa was dragonfly caught in thick forest bush, painstakingly brisk, pinched at its tail
Biting at the bend of body - a Chant Royal, announcing the end of the holiday season
in raining June.

The same empty feeling of a house not being there
off Mae Dos Pobres church road, Nuvem.

A haiku of courtyard leaf lost over time,
a gleaming pebble etched wet on a wave receding

A roof caved in of an old Portuguese bungalow
where an Uncle saw it for a rehash of modernity:
stacks of cubby houses atop rows of reeking staircase
-an apartment building! (‘Like they have it in Bombay.')
A tragedy of childhood memories always sold cheap
and unquestioned.
Eulogy
ode, ironical.

A blank verse, final resting place.
No matter what the disillusions be,
return to a promised land.

Elegy.






*bebdo - drunkard
ankwaar kodi - spinster curry (literal translation in Konkani)