Tea With Reza

Little glasses warmed by steam
Posing ballerinas pirouetting in silver holders
Glassy eyes too from steaming tears in
Tea-colored eyes
The kettle whistled Reza said, like
The train whizzing past his little
Iranian township that sang
Khoshbakhtam, khoshbakhtam!
Where poplars grew tall, very tall
Reza’s arms ceramic and
Bent bow-like from his time in jail
In a dark cell where he wasn’t given
Books to read or
Newspapers but just lashes and blows
Now and then for reading Marx
At the university
His tealeaf eyelids brimming up
With that memory …
He handed us glasses on silver holders
Held them tender, candles during prayer
The Revolution was not for my
Heart and soul, Reza cried
O my dear comrades, O my friends…
I came to be with you for freedom
And manifestos and democracy
Talks showering morning’s calm
On poplars I loved, my friends loved
Friends who were lost and gone
For singing The Internationale
Their arms bent too, cracked ceramic
Backs scarred, resting in unknown graves
Sometimes letters from prison came
Once a year, till they stopped, mentioning
The smell of tea freshly brewed
Just like this, verses of aroma
Coiling over us during our tea
With Reza one nineties evening…
He still waits in exile.

- Nabina Das

(featured in the poetry forum 03.29.09)

Ideals Of A Fiery Past

Election nights during university days are topics
We discuss every November with winter’s burn
On the skin and wood-charred star fruit potato
Salads on the run also while sitting in the sun.

Hands locked under shawls, from the gaze of Delhi
Kettles of faded coffee painted with powder milk
Slogans for Ho Chi Minh, posters on Che’s beard
Lips of embers at night from passion of life spilled.

If you look carefully, days were somnambulists then
Ideals a bunch of incense sticks I’d wrapped away
Now when I’m home I knock on my neighbor’s wall
Turn it down there, sleep early, no more punk blare.

- Nabina Das

(added 03.29.09)

When Kali Speaks for Us

Our protests: a hint of a line
Tangential, broadstroked sounds

Gets to the point of geographical imminence
as the hidden, ocular.

Sounds from Kali’s tongue
Temporality in its soft sinew.

Our needs: like blood or beginning, mythical and florid
With tales of lines merging in
Never-ending elegies for the world’s wars.

Our poverty charts: a slight curve, entwining
Basking in eagerness, as all of our significations do,
To meet the other shoot that may not bloom.

Our oblong sounds: droplets of redness
From Kali’s tongue, a rustling of words
Rushing with streams of limbs of our bodies
Stern and standing, candle smokes waiting.

I pick a little dot on that verisimilitude of lexicon
My concentric speech burgeoning

And as I say this, outside our windows large and small
Hands and motions like rattling airwaves
Multiply in more lines curves spaces words

And when my fingers touch them one by one
I get to the point, learn beginnings, draw a center

Oblong as the sound from Kali’s tongue
A mesh of roots with no origin. Speech impure. Imminent.

- Nabina Das

(added 03.29.09)