Ronald Tuhin D'Rozario
The body in exile
I live in a city of unloved houses
Its walls grown the silence of forest
A crow rises a Kalbaishakhi —
My throat of unanswered prayers,
stands in a trial before the landlord.
The women in petticoats of lime,
Pump kerosene stoves —
Their windfallen hair, fill buckets of clouds.
A button flies off the shirt
Dorji pishi pulls back the prodigal with thread
And sews where the marigolds bloom.
The children with Adam’s bones —
In voices eaten by dusk,
fight for their underwear
They throw spit bombs
Wearing a tongue of blacksmith’s apron.
An eclipse obscures the eyes of the windows
Its citizens are a boat wreck,
They have sex in whispers —
Pushing a chest of emptiness.
The tap whistles the song of a sleepy radio station
Searching a bandwidth in the spleen.
They throw on my plate some rice and a quarter of moon,
The smoke crawls from its peak as fire lit Kangchenjunga
Strapping me to its barricade.
I wash the dishes in my neighbour’s snores
Rahim chacha —
drags his rickshaw from the stand.
A rusty callus full-grown with memories,
fishes the rocky cliff of his foot.
No one weeps over a man’s absence
He only borrows a name, in a lost tribe
On the face of April’s stubborn afternoon —
dying slowly with his God.
The denials of the day are a semicolon on flesh
It rains, after rain —
Packing the graveyard in its belly,
Darkness is a sister to Helen Keller,
Translating touch by each finger.
On one of my favourite days,
I pull out the thirst of seasons from my ribs —
They swim through my incompleteness.
Something has got changed in me
I reset the clock with baba’s age,
His shadow is a tired traveller —
fending the earth in its copper armour.
Man is an extension of his mother’s heart.
I live in a city of unloved houses
Its walls grown the silence of forest
A crow rises a Kalbaishakhi —
My throat of unanswered prayers,
stands in a trial before the landlord.
The women in petticoats of lime,
Pump kerosene stoves —
Their windfallen hair, fill buckets of clouds.
A button flies off the shirt
Dorji pishi pulls back the prodigal with thread
And sews where the marigolds bloom.
The children with Adam’s bones —
In voices eaten by dusk,
fight for their underwear
They throw spit bombs
Wearing a tongue of blacksmith’s apron.
An eclipse obscures the eyes of the windows
Its citizens are a boat wreck,
They have sex in whispers —
Pushing a chest of emptiness.
The tap whistles the song of a sleepy radio station
Searching a bandwidth in the spleen.
They throw on my plate some rice and a quarter of moon,
The smoke crawls from its peak as fire lit Kangchenjunga
Strapping me to its barricade.
I wash the dishes in my neighbour’s snores
Rahim chacha —
drags his rickshaw from the stand.
A rusty callus full-grown with memories,
fishes the rocky cliff of his foot.
No one weeps over a man’s absence
He only borrows a name, in a lost tribe
On the face of April’s stubborn afternoon —
dying slowly with his God.
The denials of the day are a semicolon on flesh
It rains, after rain —
Packing the graveyard in its belly,
Darkness is a sister to Helen Keller,
Translating touch by each finger.
On one of my favourite days,
I pull out the thirst of seasons from my ribs —
They swim through my incompleteness.
Something has got changed in me
I reset the clock with baba’s age,
His shadow is a tired traveller —
fending the earth in its copper armour.
Man is an extension of his mother’s heart.