Category: Poetry

LA CASA AZUL

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 2 Comments
First published in Saaranga

For Frida Kahlo

A sea rises from your iris,
its cobalt waves mapping
your skin, tunneling into your

Bones a freak accident left
Paralyzed — life’s black
humour at 18. But what use

Would you have for walking
When you had wings to take
Off to the azure horizon and

Set it ablaze with the crimson
Desires of your heart.
The earth smells in

you a confidant who knows
Its ripe secrets — the dust
and sweat of toilers. So do

the flowers that sprout from
Your hair. And the birds in
Your seeded tropical oasis.

The urn still breathes in your
Warm scent that wanders
Alongside the cats in the blue house.

La Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City. Photo: Bhaswati Ghosh

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In Praise of Slowness

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

Because time is not a
Super highway, not even a
Road. It’s the mist that rolls

Over mountains when one
Cares to notice. Drink it like

A flu patient does chicken broth.

Learn to watch like
The robin does, letting an
Entire universe unfold

Within while eying
A single worm. Listen to the
radio as it rebukes you.

It’s the friend you
Forsook, like paper and postage
Stamps did letters.

Discard the rust of
Ambition for the never-fading
Sheen of idleness.

Like the chirping of birds in
Spring, reserve all your haste
For love alone.

First published in Madras Courier
Photo by Skylar Kang on Pexels.com

Ganga and Mahadev by Rahi Masoom Raza

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment
Translation: Bhaswati Ghosh

My name sounds like a Muslim’s
Slaughter me and set my home ablaze
Plunder the room where my statements stay awake
Where I whisper to Tulsi’s Ramayana
And say to Kalidasa’s Meghdoot
That I, too, have a message.
My name is like that of Muslims
Kill me and torch my house
But remember that the water of Ganga courses through my veins
Throw a splash of my blood on Mahadev’s face
And say to that yogi — Mahadev
Withdraw this Ganga now
It has sunk into the bodies of the degraded Turks
Where it runs as blood.

गंगा और महादेव
राही मासूम रज़ा

मेरा नाम मुसलमानों जैसा है
मुझको कत्ल करो और मेरे घर में आग लगा दो
मेरे उस कमरे को लूटो जिसमें मेरी बयाने जाग रही हैं
और मैं जिसमें तुलसी की रामायण से सरगोशी करके
कालीदास के मेघदूत से यह कहता हूँ
मेरा भी एक संदेश है।
मेरा नाम मुसलमानों जैसा है
मुझको कत्ल करो और मेरे घर में आग लगा दो
लेकिन मेरी रग-रग में गंगा का पानी दौड़ रहा है
मेरे लहू से चुल्लू भर महादेव के मुँह पर फेंको
और उस योगी से कह दो- महादेव
अब इस गंगा को वापस ले लो
यह ज़लील तुर्कों के बदन में गढ़ा गया
लहू बनकर दौड़ रही है।

Bhimpalasi

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

A faint note of his flute.
An abstracted Radha
wanders through a
flower garden. She loses
herself in his strains.

Why do you wander
in the forest looking for
him, Kabir teases. He’s
everywhere, in everything.
Entwined in your very being.

Bhimpalasi courts me even
now. Still as shy. Still
as persistent. Soft. Plaintive.

I seek like Radha. Sometimes I
Find like Kabir.

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Malkauns

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ 4 Comments

Radio waves dance between
sleep and the half light
of dawn. Yawning, Ma adjusts the
knob to wake up the station. The man
on the radio invokes the Mother in
gravelly chants. Malkauns,
waiting in the wings,
takes the stage. The beginning
begins.

Far away, in another lifetime,
a temple bell rang. The devotee,
crazy for a single glimpse of the
lord, cried his heart out. “Don’t
shatter my hopes; leave me not.”
The dark-skinned god stood still.
Wobbling across decades
of palsy, an old man’s feet
breathed life into its
stone.

Malkauns moves mountains. Cripples.
Stony gods. An adored mother goddess
and her carousel of
children. It moves sleepy heads
into a dozy trance. Malkauns
moves dark nights of the soul
into mornings that must
awaken.

Lakeshore

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

When shallow, water extracts
its wages in laughter peals. Children
Slosh in the lake filling buckets, spilling
More than they draw, like their giggles
splattering over the beach.
Mothers keep watch from the shore with sips
of wine, not aged yet. Grandfathers slide back
to afternoons when sibling platoons
scattered their own ruckus on the sand. Backwards
Is the aging mind’s favourite sandpit.

At the deep end, water gets more exacting.
It asks for payment in palpitations, dense
heaving. It’s voluminous crests mock
blood rush, adventure, even love.
There’s no digging at the deep end, only
swimming and sinking. You age as the water
does — angry, quickening, fateful.

Between the shallow and the deep ends,
Water makes you float. Gravity is a
slippery trickster. Not a bedrock.

Yaman

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

First published in Saaranga

It comes with autumn’s
surreptitious footfall. Each
Alaap a waft of incense
Smoke, rarely a thunderstorm.

The oxygen of light
Slowly dissolves. With It,
the room. Yaman, like its
teevra Madhyam, persists,
cementing itself in wall
corners, sustaining
the breath.

Hours deepen. The
sun’s diurnal imperiousness
becomes a laughable hoax.
Vision loses its clues. The
world is lost, an illusion
one had given in to. Bypassing
The eye’s stubborn pathways,
Yaman rows the ears and flows
Right into the heretic heart.

No one claims darkness
better than Yaman.

LOST SEASON

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

Spring has lost its
Spring and doesn’t
spring anymore. It waits
a long time to
alight from behind a steely
Curtain. Politely, in slow
Overtures, with well-rehearsed
daffodil smiles.

Once spring was rambunctious,
impolite. It burst open
Like a ripe wood apple
In summer, pregnant with
Forbidden pleasures.

Spring lured us into sucking
a pit off its berryness.
Abandoning textbooks.
Diving into a sea of
yellow, the colour
of sudden love. Faces were
canvasses for
freestyle paint-throwing.

Spring waited for no one.
It raced straight into summer.
Spring. Sprint. Vanish.
The ripening berries its
only remnant. As tart and
impolite as spring.
As irresistible.

BURIED KNOWLEDGE

~ Bhaswati Ghosh ~ Leave a comment

Do seeds talk to each other
as they gestate in the earth’s
deep, dark womb? Are there
secrets ripening with promises
that only unborn vegetables
can know — the alchemy between
trapped moisture and heat, between
fire and water, between desire
and drowning — before
the sapling cranes its neck
overground?

Is that how seeds find
their way inside chubby aubergines
and slender beans? Life bursting into life.
One unto a pod, a bed, a whole
efflorescent farm.

Is that how, by
Multiplying, desire eclipses
drowning?

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