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Robin S Ngangom
Understanding
I can understand on this virtual day
even without smelling,
let alone touching it. So,
I’ll not say a word
about the sea giving up a toddler.
I can even understand
this groundswell of pity
as if humanity was testing the waters of feeling,
after adapting a short brackish tragedy,
despite pleas from the gentlest mourner not to use
the image of drowning
but only remember a child’s smile,
in an age whose only metaphysical worry is,
“what can be saved?”,
trees, animals, or children, for instance,
late after the mocking, “ecstatic destruction”.
Father on Earth
With a hobbling gait
my father whips out his dick
and pisses like a dog.
He’s 86 and lost his reason.
Not quite, for when he loses his temper
he blurts out: “Dog’s cunt”.
But the man who never prayed
when I was a kid
and asked us to burn his horoscope
is now humming hymns.
What is the matter with him?
Is it the strain of dementia
which is supposed to run in the family?
Is he penitent about his infidelities?
I remember his gentle physician’s hands
that mended my fractured fears
as a child,
his joke about village dogs
refusing to bark at Rip Van Winkle,
his histrionic tale of Bremen’s musicians.
My mother, long-suffering and prejudiced
could never catch a wink when he shouts
in the dead of night as his demons needle him.
But she often holds his hands and caresses them
and talks to him as one would to a child.
She’s been doing this for years now.
So it must be love.
My father now mimics my little daughter.
In fact, he is the son I never fathered.
Forgetting
When we became forgetful
We cannot remember what gives us pause
On days which seem to never end.
To forget is to die once more
Through Moses’s Egypt to the Wuhan spectacle.
Creatures, animate or not
Still journey on bravely slighting borders
Coal, dazed refugees, torpedoes, mountain goats,
Even as pestilence brokers have begun roaring:
“The economy is dead!
Long live the economy!”
We notice streets bereft of children,
Luxury yachts for the first time while
A goods train leisurely flattens
A curve of migrant workers
And snow-crowned peaks
Swim into view daily on grimy streets.
We cannot mask an ineffable fear
Unlike emperor penguins marching
In a dignified line toward extinction.
October
We are waiting inside cottages
of cloud-catching mountains
for the resolute flutes of rain to stop.
Herded all along the highway in slime
a last wave of leaves, displaced by a regime,
through perforated awnings of October trees.
Something made us lonelier.
We let too many immigrants into our hearts,
Disproportionate future left us speechless.
Spring
Trees fated to lie down
Whisper in the wind among pines that
They want to resurrect in the forest’s spell.
Unbidden, peach blossoms of torment
Fan out under lukewarm clouds.
Smoking boys with catapults come to kill birds and
The plum, gnarled by winter, shouts at them
To leave, because he is deadened
Without birds hopping from his arms, the
Squirrels scampering on his craggy shin.
But the plum puts out immaculate flowers
For a single hailstorm to ruin them fruitless.
At night, under the yellow pollen of memory
The tree is racked and cannot sleep and
Wakes up rheumy-eyed at dawn.
Funerals and Marriages
I’ve stopped going to marriages and funerals. Any demonstration of grief or joy unnerves me. Solemnity withers me and dark sartorial elegance moves no one. It’s not that I’ve forgotten kindness or to wish people happiness if they can find it. I could help the bereaved furtively after the mourners have eaten and left. I have become truly unsociable.
I can’t fathom why anyone would like to be comforted except by people they love selfishly. You only need hugs and kisses from people who give you, when pressed, your morsel of flesh. I cannot be comforted, except by the woman I love illicitly.
I often wonder about the efficacy of marriages and funerals. Could it be because others are as worried, as I was during my own wedding feast that my friends would not show up for some mystifying reason? As regards funerals, I know that if the house of the dead cannot keep a demonic hold on me my absence will not make any difference. But I don’t want to be censured for not attending marriages or funerals. I wish people would not invite me to weddings or bring news of an old acquaintance’s death. If I could I wouldn’t attend even my own funeral.
I remember the day I returned home, and without even seeing my father I went to my aunt’s house when I heard my cousin had died during my long absence. I tried to match my aunt’s grief by trying to show some tears in my eyes but ended up sniffing like a dog. After that, my cousin’s sister, my other lovely cousin, in whose body I first sang a liquid tune, gave me pineapple to eat and we smiled at each other. I used to dip my hands into her blooming breasts, a pair of frightened pigeons. But later, my dead cousin appeared in my dreams to play and protect me again as he did during our childhood. He took a long a time to go away and I had to spit three times to make sure he wouldn’t haunt me.
I remember this film about slum-dwellers in Bombay and how after the tears and the burning they would bring out their bottles of orange liquor and get drunk and have a real ball. That’s one funeral I would like to attend.
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Robin Singh Ngangom, born in Imphal, Manipur in north east India is a bilingual poet who writes in English and Manipuri. He studied literature at St Edmund's College and the North Eastern Hill University, Shillong,and serves as a Lecturer in the Dept. of English at NEHU. He is the Editor of New Frontiers, journal of the Northeast Writers' Forum, Guwahati, and is Nominating Editor for Manipuri for Katha Translation Awards, New Delhi. Among his works: --The Desire of Roots ( Poetry in English ). Cuttack: Chandrabhaga, India 2006. --Time's Crossroads ( Poetry in English ). Hyderabad: Orient Longman Ltd, India 1994. --Time's Crossroads ( Poetry in English ). Kolkata: Writers Workshop, India 1998.
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A Poem for Mother
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