A Triumvirate Of Cancer Odes Poem by Mohammad Zaman

A TRIUMVIRATE OF CANCER ODES


An Ode to Cancer

The King Crab casts its spell in one ochre morning.
The sun shines through the roof where the crimson
Bougainvillea crawls up to the eaves, almost to edge.
A plate crumbles under another; an orgy of orogeny,
Ah! My mind floats in the majesty of a mountain range.
In a distant crèche, a child learns his multiplication
Table by mindless rote; isn't it what supposed to be?
A mindless and tangy crab apple.

Glaciers melt, planets die, and even the godly Sun shall
Meet its fiery end; the King Crab of death; or death's end;
Its nebulous claws penetrating every swath of space
It spies.

Here at this river's edge, a life struggles with its other shadows;
Pathos injected in the greenery of life; hunger insatiate, love's
Most fervent image, a mirage; in the end, death is not the end;
Death is not to be feared; death is fecund for it rises again
In tomorrow's morning.

"Down to their innate molecular core,
cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed,
scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves."
(Siddhartha Mukherjee)

***

Ode to My Fallen Friend

A friend with wit; funny and lambent; I know, he stands like a
Glacial erratic in a terrain of thousand rocks, unique in rain
And shine; unflinching under the elements of harshness;
His ‘voice-under-chemo' was strained but never withered.

"Age: Twenty-one thousand nine hundred and few more undone days.
Hair: Raven. Voice: Broken & baritone, he sings on a rainy night.
Profession: An earthen man and a physician extraordinaire; and
He is dead at sixty-one! " (Inflected borrowing from Alexander Nabokov)

Life's most cherished nectar remains hidden in some
Yet-to-bloom-garden, but time is limited and indeterminate!
Unread books piles up on the unkempt desk like dirt on untilled earth.

***
We stand on the bank of this holy river of ours; we mourn;
Rippling water dance in the moonlit night, and the wind etches
Its song in the murmurs of autumn leaves; maples incarnadine;
A lonely fry swims past the tiny pebbles painted with the patina
of eons past;

And we sing our song at the loudest of falsetto; we sing of you;
And of us; so tell me, my friend, do you heart our heart's singing?

I know you are there; you do, so tell me, my friend, at what angle
Should I slice this space-time-jungle to reach your beautiful abode?
And if Everett is right, and wave function never collapses; that it
Just splits into two universes, equally true; equally alive and equally
Verdant; isn't that wonderful that crepuscule is unreal?

I know you are there, in your lively new abode, with its own sun
And moon; and its own set of stars to guide its daring mariners; so
Once again, tell me my friend, what are the cosmic coordinates of
Your new abode.

We miss you.

***

Second Ode to Cancer

My heart bears no grudges; let the King Crab gnaw at the edges
Of my earthen flesh or torment my flawed imperfectness; let it lay
Its ravenous eggs in the thousands; fear not, for it's me, my own
Doppelganger.

"Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life,
its existence a pathological mirror of ourselves."
(Siddhartha Mukherjee)

Mind adrift in vacuous clouds; gossamer threads of life and of death,
And of cancer's cruel tentacles; O' How much I despise, and yet in the
Obsidian mirror, I see an image of my own, deigned and inflected.