She’s asleep, she’s dreaming, she’s dead still bleeding
caught resting by a tunnel to the hill’s rich centre
Beside her, a donkey / an oryx / a griffin — dead or sleeping
or painted, with goat-legs and bee-wings its head is equine
The hill is a matt-finished newsflash
a child and her guardian flattened in its hug
If I had a gift I’d give it to you. Thanks for the water.
The bundle’s a grandma slung over a young man’s shoulder
The tunnel’s the reason the hill is
a target, the toll simply unforeseen
Spit in Yudhistra's eye across the night fire and truth hangs
half-born, the rest waits meconium-stained, guise unknown
A car / a plane / a boat — for a telling that honours
the Qanani, I am the chariot rounding the turn
The hill’s a hummock pounded like Bamiyan
and I could be pilloried for blasphemy
As I speed away to safety two dust figures rise
thick-thighed gnomes loose-haired to the waist
Bare-bummed to the road they’ll wait as long as it takes
for a child and her guardian to wake in the cut red dirt.
Author: gitamammen
Yellow Bulldozers
The young men run from the hopes of their fathers,
on the pulse of a dawnbreath they pound the gigabytes
to a farcrash of surf. They surge past the old canopic gate
oblivious to yellow bulldozers levelling pillars within
a magpie that warbles in a steel thicket
and an oboe deepnoting from bedrock. Pillars
built by ptolemy and demetrios that housed
in deepwords on papyrus and vellum, epics that
sidelined the glories of darheush and puru. Words
that came to nothing in the serapium where daughters
of berenice, chasing sweetwords and newbreath
once laughed the high laugh of sex. Breath
slaughtered by speeding generations now compacted
to scant metres of debris tossed up by yellow pincers
making room for steel thickets. Generations
whose faded footfalls pound, pound the cisterns
of night as a magpie warbles a high laugh
and an oboe chases newbreath.
Encrypted
November women
prowl a static sky
heads dipped,
synchronized falcons
trawling for down-drafts.
Banished from ancestral homes
by the old woman,
nightly they alight on rooftops
stuccoing gutter-rims of tradition
in vestigial harmony
their entry code long forgotten.
Nebuchadnessar’s Lion
How am I? No offence, but frankly, I’m tired.
He’s hunched beside you on the bench, seemingly absorbed
by gravel, impervious to morning’s lilt
and the jaunty thrust of the ginger-lily by the wall.
A young man, wizened from horrors of the homeland
he’s fled and the perilous boat of his near drowning, his tone
is merely observational.
If only you could summon for him a glimpse
of the capricious colour that to sceptics is simply a dull rust
or perhaps even trumpery, but for believers
is endowed with a shimmering power to combat bleaks
of all shades, even if the vagary of its visitation
remains incomprehensible equally to those privileged
with certainty on life’s purpose, as to those
certain only of its potential to annihilate.
Western preoccupation with specifics defies logic.
These well-meaning check-ups month after month
to track the geography of my pain, as though a body-part
would offer a peephole into the soul.
The meticulous sheen of his worn leather shoes, the folded
handkerchief, are poignant manifests of the meagre pegs
of habit alone availablefor the framing of his day.
Yet it’s you chance favours. For when a gallery’s stretch
of sheer canvas plunges you into startling bleak on the complexity
of nothingness, there it is, in the very next hall,
the impish gleam of a lion’s mane that sends you soaring.
So you take it out into the March morning, this thing you clutch,
blow it skywards on a wish that a weary young man
be granted a sighting, if evanescent, of the precious colour.
Making Blue
Synaesthesia is a phenomenon where a stimulus in one sensory modality leads to a perception in another, like visual (colour, say) from sound. Synaesthesia is not simile. For instance, ebony (its relevance will emerge) is a tint of black. It is also a hard wood. Ebony feels like stone. This is simile, not synaesthesia. Spears of ebony can kill. This is neither synaesthesia nor simile, but fact and also irrelevant thus far
for it is not yet now-hour. The house on the hill
is dark. It’s a house of many rooms. Each room has a window. Each window looks like a set of vertical stripes in ebony black. Past each, the sky is a paler shade of charcoal. It’s a charcoal night out there and the verticals are either prison bars
or spears. Ebony spears
carried by little warriors whose heads don’t reach sill height. Beneath each window is a ledge. The ledge runs the perimeter of the dark house. Permissible climbing occurs at a certain hour of the night, through a window down to the ledge
with
or without a spear. Navigation
along the ledge leads a curious warrior along the perimeter to the rear of the house. In a room at the rear a hum is starting up. The hum is made up of spliced strips of flat sound. Spliced horizontals of hum press against rear window verticals to skew tangentially into diamonds
of pain.
Flashes of painhum
spew out of the window
fogging up the charcoal night.
In the limestone quarry at the bottom of the hill others are starting to gather. In expectant wonder or terror,
solitary
or in groups
they wait for the return of the pre-dawn spectacular from seventy years ago. No expense has been spared on props and marketing. The gathered are speakers and mimers, not warriors and chanters. An old woman with an aching smile sits on a rock. On the previous occasion she was a child both wondrous and terrified. From high up on a lime cliff a speaker begins to speak, while to the right within a plate-glass chamber, two mimers mime. One mimes death-throes, the other echoes them a split-second later. Down in the pit they repeat the speaker’s words. I will go forth into the night, each says. The sentence is spoken clearly and in its entirety. Not I’ll go, not I will go, but I will go forth, each says again and again until columns of
I
will
go
forth
fill up the night quarry and spill (gravity suspended or irrelevant) up into the fogged up charcoal.
Meanwhile on the hill-slope from the house with window stripes that are either prison bars or spears, ebony spears, and warriors on the ledge are littler than sill-height and horizontals of hum press against verticals of ebony to skew tangentially from the rear of this etc.-etc.-house, the hum is still spewing through the fogged-up charcoal. As flashes of hum reach columns of I-will, their clashes both muddying and muddling sky and quarry, speakers chant and warriors mime, none knowing who is which or whether they will go forth streaking, or reverse back-in forthwith,
the now-hour has arrived
old is young again,
the sky’s freaking electric and the night blows
bubbles bluer than
blue.
Gita Mammen 