Date of Publish: 2019-10-06

A few poems of Namrata Pathak

 

that's how mirai eats a pomegranate

 

anticipation

 

As she prepares to eat,

she draws

the fruit;

creased,

rimmed, almost breathing.

She whispers a lullaby to the night.

The pomegranate sleeps

in a fleece of awakened needs.

Preparation

Eating a pomegranate is about

breaking boundaries.

It’s a juicy rebellion.

She makes a way for some peppery acoustics.

She becomes her own food.

She has nothing else to do.

Visuals can never teach her

what a pomegranate is.

She knows.

 

feasting

 

She sucks all the red in.

The red of the

slouching seeds.

She smashes the sun on the face of the hill;

takes in the blocks of the orange dawn.

She threads her fingers in torn tangerine:

scraps,

bit by bit,

and in absolute dominance —

making the pomegranate a worldly affair.

 

Metamorphosis

 

It’s a tough act,

not to mash the godliness in pale palms;

not to annoy the hexagons

with a hungry mouth.

Leisurely, she swipes away the flowering blobs

on the skin. Watch her do it.

Taking ages to undo the snake-skin

falling in a slew of the monsoon sky,

heaped in an outlandish rejection

one after another,

her hands and feet,

eyes and fingers,

her body that you cannot touch otherwise,

become the pomegranate.

 

rebirth

 

The pomegranate flows in half-a-litre of blood.

Each ounce a mouthful.

A seizure.

She smashes its face in a violent revenge.

Her downy boredom

melts away in nodes of the fruit;

fingers wither away

between eating and non-eating.

Mirai takes a knife, slays open

a hemisphere

of wanton wastes.

Worms.

A hive.

A non-fruit.

 

would i still write a ghazal, shahid?

 

That’s how a poem dies, Shahid. These days

nothing else matters, everything else is dead; death in

the layers of faces you put on when you thumb

the moon down into tin-sheets — and become a poet.

You are everywhere:

dying as young twirls on pods of green,

standing heavy, bent in arcs

over yesterday’s mowed soil.

The green takes the path to your house,

towards the paddy field,

combing air,

as the day is tilled into round mounds.

In this country, post offices turn

to succulent mouths, biting the edge

of the lined sky and it rains.

It rains for you, Shahid.

When death sneaks into sleepy airports,

cutting the ceiling into lilac-halves, semi-circles,

the wet gravel turns within

to suck you.

Shops pickled by salt and light

break open a dry day.

Poetry, weather-beaten,

nails you in a watery alphabet.

As the rain looks within,

retracts the rust of your cells,

the gelatinous membranes

cannot hold you to yourself.

Then.

Then.

Then.

Do I call you by my name, Shahid?

 

About the poet :

Dr. Namrata Pathak teaches in the department of English, North-Eastern Hill University, Tura, Meghalaya. She has an M.Phil and PhD from English and Foreign Languages University (formerly, CIEFL), Hyderabad. She has four books to her credit, and her latest is forthcoming from Sahitya Akademi. Her articles and creative writing have found a place in Vayavya, Nezine, Cafe Dissensus, Northeast Review, Kitaab, Coldnoon, Setu, Indiana Voice Journal, Muse India, Raiot, The Tribe,Dead Snakes, The Thumb Print Magazine, Wagon Magazine, Bengaluru Review, to name a few. She has been a recipient of FCT-Ford Foundation Fellowship and UGC-Associateship by IIAS, Shimla. She is currently working on a book on drama/theatre and an anthology of poems from North-East India. Her debut collection of poems, That's How Mirai Eats a Pomegranate, was brought out in 2018 by Red River.