Ranjit Hoskote Poems

Lightning hits the mirror and the people it holds.
Their silhouettes fall to the floor,
wisps of silver foil.
...

Honour the translator,
survivor of cadence:

struck by lightning,
he lives to tell the tale.
...

Despite the perfection of the reflected sun
which burns the water that holds it

Despite the perfection of the bullet-holed clock
that spoke its last twelve and turned to stone
...

The window's aflame with sunset
but she isn't looking or really there.

She floats above the couch,
a hypnotist standing by
...

He went back to drafting policies of state
but never forgot the courtesan in the Sanskrit play.
She wrote him letters on pages folded
in triangles like betel leaves
...

It might have been simpler to break a vase
or sift the alphabet on a credulous table,
but parlour games never featured too high
...

Call it providence if the day should turn
upon its hinges, letting light colonise
this empire of jars and shutters, this room.
A telegram on the rack spells hands that burn
...

A waver in the glass.
Heliotrope petals on the river.
He touches her drawings again.
...

No poems, really, from the Ustad's middle period.
Just a few notations he'd left to brew.
Her ivory comb. A strand of wool torn free
by a trailing fingernail, redder than any gulmohur.
...

Leave something behind: a trace of cloud
on a plate, a pair of white birds

shot by a hunter, an emerald brooch
that a shrub snatched from a princess in flight
...