NABINA DAS // Four Poems
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Crow-Night
You can drive your pick-up over the night a crow measuring its wings not that the flight is far. Right above the billboards it sits stooping, feathers dropping your spit, your eyebrow hair. You follow a face of bright colors the painter’s stroke tends bit by bit into the leftover night’s inky tray that chases behind your traveling truck. You wake up to whistle at your crow-heart absolute night on your body you knew five villages away from a faded life. Do you still remember, do you long for it? A night it was mostly unchanged starlight. Dust Circles The spinning top will circle The dust from shuffling shoes The dust from collared bones And yet spin on the epicenter On a Sarojini Nagar Sunday The spinning top will be child’s play For children whose feet will stop Looking for the sudden blue sky And the juggler who writes separated lines To his hometown of buffalo snorts. Work in Progress Feet of frames Walk up and down Hope on and out And I can paint Pyramids from the breeze Like prayer flags Atop a little street slab Stepped up straight Temple of feet or fortune For the Saturday god Whose mother didn’t speak Ill of anyone, he did. The broomkeeper has seen The dust fairies dance When hungry in their stomachs The corn-toaster has flinched When the pavement rose Gulped her corner For the steel to stand The feet to shuffle, leave. And I can smell the dung the sweat the jute ropes On your back that you carried Sometimes in the rain Nodding to the choked voice: Buy me bangles, get me dawns! You said: take me by the hand Let the corner start her song. Beaten Shape The blacksmith was like my hand, its guile coal-ed with soot and dirt-heavy while I plunged my tools into an abyss where the city churned molten faith. You sat in the street corner of memory right when your hutment reeled like the anvil flowering up to a hammer so odd. I bring my hand over the flare now and show how the nails are broken on their heads: white nails, black nails, nails with salt tears the iron rusted on our tongues so easily this city carving on your neck a scythe of words. The four poems published here are from Nabina Das' second collection of poetry, Into the Migrant City, forthcoming from Writers Workshop, India. |
Nabina Das’ debut poetry collection Blue Vessel (Zaporogue, Denmark) has been named one of the best poetry books of 2012, and the debut novel Footprints in the Bajra (Cedar Books, New Delhi) was longlisted in the prestigious Indian prize "Vodafone Crossword Book Award 2011". A 2012 Charles Wallace Fellow in Creative Writing, University of Stirling, UK, and a 2012 Sangam House Lavanya Sankaran Fiction Fellow, India, her second poetry collection Into the Migrant City, the product of an Associate Fellowship and residency with Sarai-CSDS (New Delhi) in 2010, is forthcoming soon from Writers Workshop, India. Nabina’s poetry and prose have been published in several international journals and anthologies, the latest being Prairie Schooner (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and The Yellow Nib: Modern English Poetry by Indians (Queen’s University, Belfast). Nabina is also a literary columnist to Prairie Schooner blog and is in the peer review committee of The Four Quarters Magazine published from northeast India. Nabina has won prizes in various major Indian poetry contests. A 2007 Joan Jakobson fiction scholar (Wesleyan University, US) and 2007 Julio Lobo fiction scholar (Lesley University, US), she has worked in journalism and media for about 10 years
(The Ithaca Journal, US; Tehelka news portal, Delhi). Trained in Indian classical music, she has performed in radio/TV programs and performed in street theater. Nabina teaches Creative Writing in classrooms and workshops, and blogs at http://nabinadas13.wordpress.com |