Meena Alexander Poems

I was young when you came to me.
Each thing rings its turn,
you sang in my ear, a slip of a thing
dressed like a convent girl--
...

I watch your hands at the keyboard
Making music, one hand with a tiny jot,
A birthmark I think where finger bone
...

June already, it's your birth month,
nine months since the towers fell.
...

Snails circle
A shed where a child was born.
...

Mid-May, centipedes looped over netting at the well's mouth.
Girls grew frisky in summer frocks, lilies spotted with blood.
...

In memory of Rohith Vemula (1989-2016)

Trees are hoisted by their own shadows
 Air pours in from the north, cold air, stacks of it
The room is struck into a green fever
 Stained bed, book, scratched windowpane.
A twenty-six-year-old man, plump boy face
 Sets pen to paper - My birth
Is my fatal accident, I can never recover
 From my childhood loneliness.
Dark body once cupped in a mother's arms
 Now in a house of dust. Not cipher, not scheme
For others to throttle and parse
 (Those hucksters and swindlers,
Purveyors of hot hate, casting him out).
 Seeing stardust, throat first, he leapt
Then hung spread-eagled in air:
 The trees of January bore witness.
Did he hear the chirp
 From a billion light years away,
Perpetual disturbance at the core?
 There is a door each soul must go through,
A swinging door -
 I have seven months of my fellowship,
One lakh and seventy thousand
 Please see to it that my family is paid that.
She comes to him, girl in a cotton sari,
 Holding out both her hands.
Once she loosened her blouse for him
 In a garden of milk and sweat,
Where all who are born go down into dark,
 Where the arnica, star flower no one planted
Thrives, so too the wild rose and heliotrope.
 Her scrap of blue puckers and soars into a flag
As he rappels down the rock face
 Into our lives,
We who dare to call him by his name -
 Giddy spirit become
Fire that consumes things both dry and moist,
 Ruined wall, grass, river stone,
Thrusts free the winter trees
 From their own crookedness, strikes
Us from the fierce compact of silence,
 Igniting red roots, riotous tongues
...

'It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves'
Wallace Stevens
I

Twilight, I stroll through stubble fields
clouds lift, the hope of a mountain.
What was distinct turns to mist,

what was fitful burns the heart.
When I dream of my tribe gathering
by the red soil of the Pamba River

I feel my writing hand split at the wrist.
Dark tribute or punishment, who can tell?
You kiss the stump and where the wrist

Bone was, you set the stalk of a lotus.
There is a blue lotus in my grandmother's garden,
its petals whirl in moonlight like this mountain.
...

Dear Mr. Gandhi
It was cold the day the masjid
was torn down stone by stone,
colder still at the heart of Delhi

Ten years later entering Bengali market
I saw a street filled with bicycles
girls with rushing hair, boys in bright caps
I heard a voice cry

Can you describe this?
It sounded like a voice
from a city crusted with snow
to the far north of the Asian continent.

I saw him then, your grandson
in a rusty three wheeler
wrapped up in what wools he could muster.
Behind him in red letters

a sign: Dr. Gandhi's Clinic.
So he said, embracing me, you've come back.
Then pointing to the clinic -
Its not that I'm sick

that gentleman gets my mail and I his.
That is why I am perched in this contraption.
I cannot stay long, it is Id ul Fitr.
I must greet friends in Old Delhi, wish them well.

Later he sought me out in dreams.
in a high kitchen in sharp sunlight
dressed in a khadi kurta, baggy jeans.
He touched my throat in greeting.

Listen my sweet, for half of each year,
after the carriage was set on fire
after the Gujarat killings,
I disappear into darkness..

In our country there are two million dead
and more for whom no rites were said.
No land on earth can bear this.
Rivers are criss-crossed with blood.

All day I hear the scissor bird cry
cut cut cut cut cut
It is the bird Kalidasa heard
as he stood singing of buried love.

Now our boys and girls take
flight on rusty bicycles.
Will we be cured? I cried
And he: We have no tryst with destiny.

My hands like yours are stained
with the juice of the pomegrante.
Please don't ask for my address.
I am in and out of Bengali market.
...

In another country at the river's edge
We lay down in whispering dirt,
Then tried to fix a house with hot hope.
If we live together much longer
I'll become a cloud in my own soul.
Sweet jasmine floats in a bowl,
A keyboard harbours insects
(Mites in secret laying white eggs).
I must light frankincense to smoke them out
Else the alphabets will fail.
It is written in the Kamasutra -
They embraced not caring about pain or injury,
All they wanted was to enter each other.
This is known as milk-and-water.
...

Why come to Venice? The young woman asks.
I answer in lines - their time may have passed.

As a child, half a world away
I floated in a black canoe, it sank in high water.

The lagoon swells at monsoon time and floods the Ghetto.
All the pepper of Muziris cannot buy their freedom or mine,

And painted pottery exchanged for monkeys
Or chattering peacocks cannot distill sorrow.

A fish with rainbow fins is swimming in a fountain,
It has swallowed the ring of remembrance.

This Kalidasa knew,
Dreaming of a high room by the Accademia bridge

That holds Sakuntala, still sleeping.
A bird, with feathers the color of jasmine

Has made its nest in the timbers of that bridge.
There I see a man, face painted white

A yellow star pinned to his chest,
Staring into water.

He too is part of this earthly theatre.
No one must see him weeping.
...