Sun-Blanched Blood Poem by Sudeep Sen

(for Kwame)

1

It is mid-afternoon now,
the sun streaks slant wards
through the attic's double-glazing
melting the scorched ink
in my crowded note-book
that lies blanched
on the sparse weathered table.
Hardened sepia-stained lines
that once approximated to
a flock of metaphors,
now rearrange themselves
into a congregation of phrases,
a lineation of new line-breaks:
stops that defy
even the physics of refraction,
thoughts that now re-surface
and resurrect just as
passion and reverence did
within the folds of The Prophet.

2

It is still mid-afternoon,
the blue blaze makes the pages
of my book flip over gently
in the invisible wind of silence.
The heat penetrating the glass
focuses even more fiercely
smoking out redolent similes,
questioning the whole point,
the nib of writing itself.
Underneath the permanent scar
of jet-black fluid and heat
is pulp, half-dead.
Beneath the persistent hoarse-
drone of metal-scratching
is bleached pulp, half-alive,
its cotton laid sheets
carefully encoded with
the magic arc of a gold-tip.
Words appear, and more
words. And under them all,
I discover much later,
a small spring insect
that lay mummified,
quietly crushed below
the weight of words,
its innocence and juice
trapped under oppression
of ambition and intellect,
baptised and bloodied.

3

It is mid-afternoon,
and I too lie, dead-
still, blanched, bloodied.