|
Aditi Machado's
poetry has appeared in journals such as Pratilipi, Eclectica,
nth position, tongues of the ocean and others. She won the TFA
Award for Creative Writing and the Inaugural Srinivas Rayaprol
Poetry Prize in 2009. She lives in Bangalore and blogs at
Blotting paper.
How
to collect things
There must be a method.
Don't give in to loose collections.
These aren't pennies in a jar.
You can't have people digging in,
as if to find the right jelly bean.
This is serious. This is not
playing with colours,
this is masonry,
and what you cement together
is god, an earth-grown divinity.
*
I once met a man
who placed pebble
over stone -- the difference
being in jags -- for miles
into the air.
It's a test, he said,
of angles and the gum
of air. And if they fall?
I asked. If they fall,
there's a god,
heaven-bound,
with flexible toes.
Eternity
The moon caught in the branches of a pipal tree
shines through a veil of leaf skeletons, glows
like the body of a woman.
A fish is rooted in the water, in the old,
unevaporated monsoon. The moon observes
wrinkles in the mirror above the fish, floating
now as a corpse. Now it hugs the shore;
now, nestles into a grave. Now the children find
the ferns fish-boned.
Post-love
A leaf enters stupor,
falls onto the walnut-textured road.
Suddenly he is past
that word she told him – the gun
flung across the room, like so many vases.
And more leaves limp
in the mildly alcoholic wind
or his breath, as he lies
beneath the tamarind tree,
his hand opening and closing,
as if to catch himself.
|
