S. Joseph Poems

Between these lines
sometimes I and sometimes you
may cease to exist.
We are not acquainted with each other.
We might have seen each other
in the town, or on the beach.
It might be you
who stood holding the railing of the bridge
watching someone angling down below.
Or, we must have met somewhere
While going out to buy meat or medicines.
We are just ordinary people, aren't we?
But we try to do extraordinary things.
You drive a vehicle.
Or open a shop, making use of a loan.
You pass an exam. You sing a song.
I try to write poems.
Our actions may outlive us.
I will cease to exist in the middle of my writing.
And you, in the middle of your reading.
...

The fishmonger was washing the vessel
In the running water of the tiny stream.
The screw pines did not see him.

There is a motor workshop, where the stream
Heading down straight, takes a sharp turn.
He didn't see its laterite wall either

Parallel to the stream
To the south and north
The MC road* raced away.
It's we the children who saw
In the water not even half a foot high
The body of the fishmonger
Lying facedown
The vessel, the scale and weights
Epilepsy having twirled him down
Water playing about his hair
In the water, the screw pine leaf playing about
Stabbing down and raising itself.
In the still corner of the stream
Water-bugs roaming.

What one sees reaching that same spot now:
A chicken shop
The workshop with plastered walls
The paddy-field in the earth.
There is no sign of the fishmonger.
...

I know a girl
Who has a big mole on her right cheek.
She lived some distance away
By the hillside with cashew trees.
Whenever she passed along the alleyway
By the side of my home
I would look at her, erasing that mole.

She would pass on, head bent.
Isn't she the daughter of that
Woodcutter? She has no friends - said Mother.
Later, a woodcutter married her
And she had a family and children.
There are no cashew trees there now.
Someone said
That there was something missing in my poems.
Isn't it the problem of a big mole?
I asked.
...

This is what my sister's Bible has:
a ration-book come loose,
a loan application form,
a card from the cut-throat money-lender,
the notices of feasts
in the church and the temple,
a photograph of my brother's child,
a paper that says how to knit a baby cap,
a hundred-rupee note,
an SSLC book.

This is what my sister's Bible doesn't have:
the preface,
the Old Testament and the New,
maps,
the red cover.
...

In my student days
a girl came laughing.
Our hands met kneading
her rice and fish curry.
On a bench we became
a Hindu-Christian family.
I whiled away my time
reading Neruda's poetry;
and meanwhile I misplaced
my identity card.
I noticed, she said
returning my card:
the account of your stipend
is entered there in red.
These days I never look at
a boy and a girl lost in themselves.
They will depart after a while.
I won't be surprised even if they unite.
Their identity cards
won't have scribblings in red.
...