Five Fantastic Poems by Sreekanth Kopuri

 

The Post-Covid Clock

 

old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.

-          2 Corinthians 5:17

 

Watch!  Another!

A silent watchman’s

 

Time to re-wind

To unwind meanings

 

Of death in life

Time records

 

Discord in the

Cord of mother

 

Earth’s labor pains

With the burden of the

 

Preset Eleventh

Hour’s alarm, the

 

Lockdown to earth’s

Narrowest space for

 

It’s time to set off

The old clock to

 

Word’s news about

The rapturous moment

 

 

My Language is

 

something that crumbles

with the bruised touch 

of the Silence,

 

the living weapon i need

to fight by, born without

a tongue,

 

a death with unbroken bones

dripping with dry beads of thirst –

the words

 

of its throat, muted by our thorns

of darkness in its flesh that fails

only to win

 

over the sharpened edges

of our beliefs that sickle

and hammer

 

to join hands with their objective

comrades that bluster against

the Word

 

 

Being that Right Wing Activist, I

 

am not against the left

for my faith’s rights,

 

for I'm with that Wing,

right in rewriting when

 

the writing is on the

wall of my land when

 

its right wings flap darts

into the bodies of its left,

 

the recipient site

of which I am to

 

perform the flap surgery

being the donor site

 

of that Right wing of

a land beyond now, as

 

many of my recipients'

sites are bruised with

 

encroachments on their

left where those rightists

 

slit the leftist wrists that

raised voice against the

 

spreading rightist factions

against our freedom.

 

 

 A Mission

 

Declare His glory among the nations

                                    Ps 96: 1-3

 

The wind's heavy

day by day on this

dying tree. The

 

strange absence of

bird songs and the

un-perched branches

 

overgrown with the

season’s sweet burden,

try to spill ripe leaves

 

that roll back along the

dark wide way  to find

the roots from its fourth

 

generation to account for

all those unyielding years

with the Truth but the

 

wind blows heavier than

ever with its rising force

to uproot as this tree waits

 

for the fulfilment of that

promise: to preach good

tidings unto the meek;...to

 

bind up the broken-hearted.

A flock of birds is already

on it's way to build the

 

everlasting nests here

where the apocalypse’

hand can’t reach. But

 

the roots struggle to

bear this pain of the

truth’s silence with the

 

persecuted patience that

only the bleeding sap

of resistance knows.

 

The Corona

 

of an eclipse,

afoot, may be, after

 

the Sun turns its face away

from our primitive hunger.   

 

The unseen alarm rings,

fly off like the shurikens,

 

the lunar new year of rat threw, to

cut the edacious bone china belly

  

to powder it, to raise the dead fauna

back to life and those poor ones too

 

in hopeless Huanan’s cages. The red

taped mouth of Dr. Li’s whistle blows

 

only after his funeral: there should be

more openness and transparency.

 

Deaths become secret

as those quarantines.

 

Sometimes a famous

allegory like the Old Major

 

becomes truth as the Civets or Bats

of Wuhan, perhaps with another

 

revolutionary song, "Beasts of my brother"

but in cold asphyxiation of a genocidal fury

 

that seals my brother’s fate indoors

with police tapes where our scared

 

neighbours fling us food for the fear

of the pestilence that stalks in darkness.

Sreekanth Kopuri is an Indian English poet, Alumni Writer in Residence, Athens and a Professor of English from Machilipatnam, India. He recited his poetry and presented his research papers in University of Oxford, John Hopkins University, Heinrich Heine University and many other countries. His poems and research articles have been published in Christian Century, Memory House, Shot Glass, Rational Creature, Heartland Review, Nebraska Writers Guild, Poetry Centre San Jose, Underground Writers Association, Word Fountain, A New Ulster, Synaeresis, Wend Poetry, Vayavya, Ann Arbor Review to mention a few. His book Poems of the Void was finalist for the EYELANDS BOOKS AWARD Greece, 2019. He is the recipient of IMMANUEL KANT AWARD for his collection of poems on Silence 2020. Kopuri did PhD in English from Sri Venkateswara University and Masters from Andhra University. He is presently an independent research scholar in Contemporary Poetry, Silence, and Holocaust poetry. He lives in his hometown Machilipatnam with his mother teaching and writing.