Sukrita Paul Kumar
Many a Moment
In my wakeful moments
my eyes close
to keep my dreams alive
trees find roots in the skies
their arms digging into the centre of the earth
my eyes lapping the taste of fruit
in the feathery moonlight
snowflakes pat rainbows on my skin
over the river of fire,
of flapping tongues,
of red into yellow
frozen memory unwinding
on the screen of my eyelids
white and black robes
twirling in circles
The coal face of Mwangi,
black bewildered night
eyes twinkling
lips spouting as mushrooms
palms large as river-basins
sliding down my spine
I, frolicking and just nine,
With chocolate melting in my mouth
rolling down the cloud
doing ngoma
ball after ball caught in the net
the helpless stick in my hands
at the far end the flailing freckled
white arms of the PT Ma’am
I, never a keeper of goals
Swimming in deep waters
I drown again
and yet again,
But come afloat always
humming the songs of ancestors
smell the first rain on the parched earth
and feel the heart-throb of
babies yet to be conceived
…………………………………………………..
Voyaging at Ten
Between awesome expanses
of deep blue oceans
and the greying sky
I stood,
a speck in God’s creation
leaning on the rails
of the deck
sailing from Mombasa
to Bombay…
a journey with a
beginning and an end
and no middle
A storm
a swarm of sharks
or whales
failure of
the engines of Amra
or a mere giving way
of the railing
Blue death;
Anything,
a trivial something
or a grave lapse
I cannot swim
The shores are not
in sight…
*******
Sukrita Paul Kumar, poet and critic, was born and brought up in Kenya. She held the prestigious Aruna Asaf Ali Chair at Delhi University. Formerly, a Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, she was an invited poet at the International Writing Programme, Iowa, USA and Hong Kong Baptist University. Honorary faculty, Durrell Centre at Corfu, Greece, she has been a recipient of many prestigious fellowships and residencies. Her recent collections of poems amongst others are Country Drive, Dream Catcher, Untitled and Poems Come Home (with Hindustani translations by Gulzar). Amongst her critical books are Narrating Partition and Conversations on Modernism. Her translations include Nude, book of poems by Vishal Bhardwaj and the novel, Blind (HarperCollins). A guest editor of journals such as Manoa (Hawaii) and Muse India, she has held exhibitions of her paintings. Many of her poems come out of her experience of working with the homeless, the street children and Tsunami victims
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