Poems by Pratibha

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What do we make of this time?



Time is illusion –
nothing that happens now 
hasn’t happened before
yet nothing will be the same again.

The year locusts came,
nature turned feral to reclaim itself;
dolphins came back to docks,
swans to canals, flouting social distancing.
Blushed flamingos swamped the lakes in waiting,
even the sea came in swirling cyclones
to claim the shores, mangroves,
cattle, trees, tin roofs, electric poles
and the homeless.
Only sparrows didn’t come back
to cities under house arrest 
working from home on pay cuts,
cities stuck in between chasing deadlines,
cities hanging from skyscraped balconies
watched countryless migrants
barely alive on the philanthropy
of bread, bananas and cheap biscuits,
walking away with leftover homes in rags,
carcasses of lower-middle-class hopes,
bundled on battered shoulders,
and tattered spirits of bloody footsteps
singed on scorching tarmac miles
measuring the arithmetic of loss
between departures and arrivals.

Between the closed doors of alienation
unable to keep up with time
that runs in circles with no exit
minds held hostage to clockwork of loneliness
pushed themselves off the cliff
into panic, anxiety, despair, death’s deliverance.
Elsewhere between the brick walls of intimate aggressions
a tally of bruised moments on bodies
smacked blue with blows, belts, sex and servitude
by tyranny of petty grievances kept private.
When did domestic abuse make sensational news
to nations that have only war on their mind?

If we survive, what do we make of this time
that unfolded like lines of a poem
                              whacked out of enjambment by police brutality,
time that feels like choked testimony
by knee on the neck of:
poets, professors, pregnant women, students,
doctors who dared to save lives,
by privilege that gives two hoots
for batons-shoved-up-the-arse,
because not all lives matter 
or make trending hashtags!

What do we make of this time in our hands
that can’t be washed off with soap and water?
Case studies on survival of the richest?
Data on pandemic profits and losses?
Statistics of each day spikes? 
Nostalgia for the dead?
Quarantine art in shades of hope? 
Viral webinar talks?
Perhaps……
a new normal of tabooed touch, 
masked smiles, digitized lives, 
sanitized selective empathy?
Or…... regret 
that blows up meaning out of our jaws
like an explosive-laced pineapple?


[This poem was shortlisted for the Glass House Poetry Award hosted by ArtMantram Foundation in July 2020.] 


To the storyteller


In the end, we’ll all become stories.
                                      – Margaret Atwood


A single story is dangerous.
No story is a true story,
there are anomalies of memory
familiar only in remembrance
or lost in pitch black forgetfulness
like fang-toothed, deep-ocean monster-fish
frightening in ugly luminance.
Then in the violence of propaganda
truth is lost in conformity, 
authenticity is lost 
in the errors of synonyms, 
in the architecture of surveillance,
in the myopia of space measured,
by the irreducible distance
between the arch of one’s foot,
because we all have feet
but not all of us have walked the world.

They tell you to tell your story, 
but expect only a mutiny of words – 
a testimony of trauma, shame, suffering
a saga of difference, humiliation,
because pity sells, 
can be taught in universities,
fits neatly in the binary.
But born webbed in other stories by others,
Othering feels like an unfamiliar-familiarity –
a frayed weariness, of unwanted 
second-hand coats cast away by strangers
you do not know how young, how old, how dead,
but this jadedness of the weave now your own, 
entangled in the warp and weft of yarn,
you found an attachment enough to keep 
your body warm in winter,
your frost-bitten vulnerability out of sight
from eyes prying for your nakedness.
Then you know, your story, is never yours alone.
There is so much of me in you,
of us in them, them in us,
in the desire to be narratable.
Yet …
my story can never be completely yours,
your story not completely mine.


[This poem enunciates the precariousness of ‘authentic autobiographical narratives’ and has been inspired by Italian philosopher, Adriana Cavarero’s idea expressed in Relating Narratives that our autobiographies are given to us by others.]

Camouflage


Thoughts black, white, and grey
camouflaged predators and prey
play peek-a-boo within,
mind’s landscape−
a tropical rainforest,
a poem−
the penetrating glimmer of a tiger’s eye.

About the Poet

Pratibha

Pratibha is Assistant Professor (English & Communication) at Bennett University, India. She earned her M.Phil. and Ph.D. in English Literature from the Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Her poetry e-book Taboo and Other Poems, was published on Kindle in 2020. Brief, terse, lyrical, ironical, and laced with emotions, her published and unpublished poems are word vignettes on the page rendering quieter, fleeting moments and unspoken thoughts in their rawness and simplicity. She can be contacted at: pratibhabiswas85@gmail.com

The post Poems by Pratibha first appeared on Prachya Review.

What do we make of this time? - Prachya Review

Poems by Pratibha