Uma Gowrishankar |
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A Tale From The Forgotten Land
Mountains thunder down their brawny torsos
nose askew elephants in confusion
wade the river that has lost the banks.
I move homes by tricking the bones and lungs
fold into the heights, curl fetal in the hollow of rocks
as even the eagle rolls out larger than me.
The air coils in tension along the shoulder of the cliff.
Everything is red this morning – the soil, the river -
bloody like the spout from the hawk’s neck.
Stars wheel though darkness as in creation-time.
Where are the homes of birds, food for the bees,
the sun whose rays must penetrate the graves?
Does The Road Cleave Or Connect?
Is the river that veined the mountains tangled limbs of trees,
arms knotted in a trauma of death dark, tar-like?
That is what happens to the soul crunched by clumps of rocks that
turn the valley into a gash of mouths sucking air in blocked throats.
The sun a discharged bomb spills a copper column into the sky,
a concrete slab crushes the chest of the earth scarred by explosions.
The river twists around jagged debris, the mountain prone,
thighs slashed lengthwise and all the way into the womb.
You must ask what is the need to reach the shrine in six hours.
Take in your mouth the brine tossed from the sea million years ago
when universe narrated a different story, fossilized dreams in folds
of the brain gutted now by the road that cleaves you at the core.
Mountains thunder down their brawny torsos
nose askew elephants in confusion
wade the river that has lost the banks.
I move homes by tricking the bones and lungs
fold into the heights, curl fetal in the hollow of rocks
as even the eagle rolls out larger than me.
The air coils in tension along the shoulder of the cliff.
Everything is red this morning – the soil, the river -
bloody like the spout from the hawk’s neck.
Stars wheel though darkness as in creation-time.
Where are the homes of birds, food for the bees,
the sun whose rays must penetrate the graves?
Does The Road Cleave Or Connect?
Is the river that veined the mountains tangled limbs of trees,
arms knotted in a trauma of death dark, tar-like?
That is what happens to the soul crunched by clumps of rocks that
turn the valley into a gash of mouths sucking air in blocked throats.
The sun a discharged bomb spills a copper column into the sky,
a concrete slab crushes the chest of the earth scarred by explosions.
The river twists around jagged debris, the mountain prone,
thighs slashed lengthwise and all the way into the womb.
You must ask what is the need to reach the shrine in six hours.
Take in your mouth the brine tossed from the sea million years ago
when universe narrated a different story, fossilized dreams in folds
of the brain gutted now by the road that cleaves you at the core.
