Arundhathi Subramaniam Poems

May things stay the way they are
in the simplest place you know.
...

It’s taken time
to realise
no one survives.
Not even the ordinary.
...

You believe you know me,
wide-eyed Eng Lit type
from a sun-scalded colony,
reading my Keats – or is it yours –
...

In the women's compartment
of a Bombay local
we seek
no personal epiphanies.
...

I live on a road,
a long magic road,
full of beautiful people.
...

Give me a home
that isn't mine,
where I can slip in and out of rooms
without a trace,
...

To swing yourself
from moment to moment,
to weave a clause
that leaves room
...

It takes a certain cussedness
to be a tree in this city,
a certain inflexible woodenness
...

My grandmother,
wise even at eight,
hid under her bed
when her first suitor came home.
...

Again and again the same questions, my love,
those that confront us
and vex nations,
or so they claim -

how to disarm
when we still hear
the rattle of sabre,
the hiss of tyre
from the time I rode my red cycle
all those summers ago
in my grandmother's back-garden
over darting currents of millipede,
watching them,
juicy, bulging, with purpose,
flatten in moments
into a few hectic streaks of slime,

how to disarm,
how to choose
mothwing over metal,
underbelly over claw,
how to reveal raw white nerve fibre
even while the drowsing mind still clutches
at carapace and fang,

how to believe
this gift of inner wrist
is going to make it just a little easier
for a whale to sing again in a distant ocean
or a grasshopper to dream
in some sunwarmed lull of savannah.
...