Hometowns and homes

It’s ages since I’ve been to that teashop

and I haven’t gone back down that straight lane

where cobblers used to sit by the bus stop

though I’ve thought often I must go back again,

see myself if the lamppost with the dent

is the same still? wires sagging drunkenly;

if the same old cracks split up the pavement

made wider perhaps by that jamun tree.

We played barefoot, we rarely had shoes on

and had no business with the shoeshine guy.

I wonder if new hopscotch lines get drawn

and if the shop still serves our spiced up chai?

But what if the jamun has been cut down? -

tough that homes don’t always stay in hometowns.

Ordinary trips

I.

All my journeys, even the quick trips

to top up the fridge, to the corner store

were pilgrimages – I just didn’t know it –

sacred without the fuss of unstitched cloth.

Sacred without strong curling incense smoke

without the sound of bells, and sandal paste,

everyday sacred – a flea bitten dog

by the roadside rooting in the vats

raising his head at my scent, to sniff

and drop it back again in the trash,

a sudden war-conch blare in the traffic

inching forward to meet the peak hour rush.

All of them were pilgrimages – each one

on hallowed ground without any milestone.

II.

Each step peels away in moments, yet builds

a spine and shrinks it too, it is deepened

even as it is deeply scooped and stripped.

I walk home with rice and a frozen chicken.

Is the body a cell? It never felt

a prison, the room never like a shrine,

the sacred always outside in a world

of rotting mango peels, feet crumbed with grime

washing at the gobbets of old tube wells.

My heels are cracked with winter, lashes spiked

with discharge, but they can bear witness still

to the small miracles of runway lights

guiding the plane back on land. Every trip

a sacredness – I just didn’t know it.

III.

Yet it knows, deep within its chemical paths

the body knows and responds to sacred -

that’s why it stands barefoot on the earth

turns to the red glow beyond its shut eyelids,

and opens them for dogs on garbage heaps,

thinks the doorsill is its point of conflict. –

There's a degree of sacred in concrete,

if the earth's paved over, nothing's diminished.

And that’s why it walks to the corner store,

onto the four point crossing, and the bus stop

and beyond that, and beyond! goes where it goes

in blind tribute, yanked by its own make up.

That’s why it leaves, the fridge’s just a pretext,

and why it comes back and plans where to go next.

In my apron

Poppy field by van Gogh, 1890. Image credit

I will not let this snow cover

of violence deaden my world

into breathless radio silence.

I will not let sandpaper words,

the hard, wind-tossed hearts of vandals,

swamp out the daisies and poppies

when and where it’s spring. I’ll let drifts

of leaves fall wherever they want,

weave against this doorsill in autumn.

I’ll pluck huge bouquets of hope,

keep them massed in my apron

like secret talismans. From the red

wildfires of poppies I’ll pick them,

and from the red, dead leaf banks.

I’ll walk miles of cheerful wildflowers

and the sky’ll sew its own linings

overhead in gold and silvershine.

And the sharp-spiralled razor wires

won’t stop a single leaf. Or stop me

from holding the flaming bunches

in the crook of my torn elbows.

***

In praise of some violence

A-Z reflections: At the end of something or other - n still Zetetic, though Zonked...

For some vague reason this song has been bzzzzzing in my head…so I might as well share it here.  

As with the other years, intrepid stranger or close friend, you pays no money, but you gets your choice - take your pick -