Dead Bee
There's a dead bee on the floor.
Every time I pass it by,
It looks like a word
Torn off an old Bible.
Every time
I pass it by
I tell myself
Next time.
Next time
I'll throw it out of the window.
Small thing.
Ain't a big problem.
But
Who remembers
The miles it travelled,
The honey it picked
Along the way,
The things it did
Along the way,
To satiate the garden flowers,
Who remembers,
Who'll pick it up,
Tenderly,
To give
A dead bee,
For all the honey,
It gave the world,
A decent burial?
It Doesn't Matter
It doesn't matter.
This is not the first time.
I guess this is the way
Words run into forests,
Climb mountains,
And swim the rivers and the seas.
This is not the first time
That you seek
To hide.
To find excuses, saying,
You thought it was water,
Not wine.
But you were mine, oh yes,
Mark that line,
As you undressed love
Like a negligee
And went nude to your bed.
It was easy when you woke up,
Everything was shed.
How easy
To bite that fruit
Always looking for your lips,
And taste it,
Round the bend.
It was bright
it was light,
It was all dream shine.
You loved it
And drank all that
Wine.
And you knew you were
In my mind,
And would be
Till eternity
Drew the line.
But that was already,
A hive where bees came to dine.
All the rest is honey.
And you know the truth,
We know it between us,
All that sweetness
You had me bake
With dead bees.
Smilestones
I often drive by
That familiar road.
Same car. And when I’m back in places,
Where you are there in the valley
Your hundred faces
In the sun's piano light
Doing their appearing act again.
I stop,
And let you rain.
I turn to the left.
Empty seat.
I get that urge again
To kiss the cushion
To get at your hair
All over me again.
Same distance.
But the heart has reset the clock work,
And what was just miles,
Is now all smilestones
In light years.
Red
I read, all that red,
Of the hearts of poets,
They had nothing else to say,
But of that red that bled,
That was born of lips, that had now gone to bay. Of cheeks, that turned amber, without
warning,
That so long lay gold.
Ah, the hearts of poets,
They must more muddied get,
All wet, lose glitter,
But her ink,
That without a wink
Writes sleep,
That writes waking,
That writes all those kitten- drowned lines.
It must be all red, always read,
Wayward things,
The ways her hair stings
The passing breeze,
Her one careless word
That arc lights
A Timeless solitude of poetry.
Great Grandmother
Great grandmother in her younger days
Was a beautiful lady.
Many were the students who would stand by the corridors
To wish her ‘Good morning Madam’ In the misty Delhi mornings
Nearly two hundred years before.
Great Grandmother taught Shakespeare,
Her favourite was ‘The Tempest’
An Avon edition in silky white pulp
With a bright balding Shakespeare
Looking strangely handsome
That she read every night
Before turning to sleep,
Like the Gita or the Bible
And kept under her pillow.
By then, great grand mother
Was already a widow.
In her late twenties
As she waited at the village railway station,
What greeted her out of the sleeper coach
Of the late-night train,
Was the railway coffin, with her husband in it.
He had died on the way.
Great grandmother
Then went back to do her post-graduation.
Back to Shakespeare. Marry again? Never.
He was my life, she would say.
‘The few moments with him
Are my eternity’.
It was a great code to us
That put her on purity’s pedestal.
She became our fairy tale of chastity.
Grandmother rose to become
The Head of the Department of English.
She lived all her life
In a girl’s hostel,
helping students to write British
English
And poetry.
When grandmother retired,
She came back to Kerala,
All her relations welcomed her Wishing, that all her life wealth
Would be theirs.
They gave her all she wanted, plantains dipped in honey,
But grandmother would have none of that.
Nothing of her wealth.
Even the fruit of her mango trees
became bank FDs.
One day while climbing the wooden stairs of her ancestral home,
Great grandmother slipped and fell. She broke her spine.
The doctors said
She would never rise again.
I remembered then,
great grandmother, standing before my old Click 3 camera
By the hanging blossoms of the Chinese lanterns. She was still beautiful
At 78. A kind of Portia.
That was when she fell. Independent soul,
great grandmother, she said she would lie in an ashram,
To die. She would not burden
Any relative. To the ashram
She would give all her wealth.
You come alone, she mumbled,
You go all alone.
Soon, all her relations, they said, Stingy, dirty, old selfish woman,
No wonder her husband died young.
No wonder she broke her spine.
God did right.
We’ll have nothing to do any more with her.
Time lays big eggs in the desert
And life scoops them down in the dust.
Thirty years later
I visited my great grandmother at the ashram.
She’d been lying in bed for thirty years now,
Bed sores sun flowering about her spine,
That the ashram mates washed at guest-time.
She lay, her open eyes
Rolling up the old teak ceiling, Completely blind.
She was told by the holy sister of the benevolent ashram,
Akka, your favourite grandnephew has come.
In a room that smelt of sudden Dettol
And tulsi trying to outsmart all pus,
Great grandmother held me tenderly by my hand,
(The same touch that gave me
such a beating l’ll not forget
The night I tried to
Dislodge ‘The Tempest’ from underneath her pillow)
And she kept mumbling to me,
You have come
You have at last come,
I waited for you so long I knew you would come I knew you would find me.
Now I can die,
I can die in peace
God will not put me to test any longer,
My time has come,
My time has at last come
God will not let me suffer any longer.
Her cataract eyes flitted like silver butterflies.
That afternoon as I drove back among the paddy fields diamonding rain
amongst its tiny flowers,
The rain wipers momentarily
Clearing glass,
I dreamt my dream.
It was all,
About God, all about the earth’s seasons, all about you and me,
Why the seas churn the sands choking our lives
Immersing us in tidal grandeur,
Why all this benevolence of fire
Blossoming us
In its burns.
Gopikrishnan Kottoor's recent poetry features in Best
Asian Poetry, 2021, The Bloodaxe Book of
Contemporary Indian Poets, The Golden
Jubilee anthology of Indian Poetry in
English, Year Book of Indian Poetry in English, Converse, 75 years of English
Poetry by Indians, among others. Among his notable prizes for
poetry is the All India- British Council Poetry Prize . His
latest poetry collection ‘Swan Lake’ has just been released . He is presently
working on the English translation of the Malayalam pastoral classic, Ramanan.
He edits the online poetry journal www.chipmunk.co.in
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