Poems by ​Sudeep Sen 

​kargil
 
Our street of smoke and fences, gutters gorged
with weed and reeking, scorching iron grooves //
of rusted galvanise, a dialect forged
from burning asphalt, and a sky that moves //
with thunderhead cumuli grumbling with rain, ….
— derek walcott, Tiepolo’s Hound, Book One, (II).1
 
Ten years on, I came searching for
                              war signs of the past
expecting remnants — magazine debris,
unexploded shells,
               shrapnels
                              that mark bomb wounds.
 
I came looking for
                                                            ghosts --
people past, skeletons charred,
abandoned
                              brick-wood-cement
                                             that once housed them.
 
I could only find whispers --
                                whispers among the clamour
of a small town outpost
                                                            in full throttle --
everyday chores
                                             sketching outward signs
                              of normalcy and life.
 
In that bustle
                              I spot war-lines of a decade ago --
though the storylines
                              are kept buried, wrapped
in old newsprint.
 
There is order amid uneasiness --
                                             the muezzin’s cry,
the monk’s chant --
                              baritones
                              merging in their separateness.
At the bus station
                              black coughs of exhaust
smoke-screen everything.
                                             The roads meet
and after the crossroad ritual
                                                            diverge,
skating along the undotted lines
                                                            of control.
A porous garland
                              with cracked beads
adorns Tiger Hill.
                              Beyond the mountains
                                             are dark memories,
and beyond them
                              no one knows,
                                                            and beyond them
no one wants to know.
 
Even the flight of birds
                                             that wing over their crests
don’t know which feathers to down.
                              Chameleon-like
they fly, tracing perfect parabolas.
 
I look up
               and calculate their exact arc
and find instead,                                a flawed theorem.
 
 
 

 
grammar
 
she has no english;
her lips round / in a moan ....
calligraphy of veins ....
— merlinda bobis, ‘First Night’
 
My syntax, tightly-wrought --
I struggle to let go,
to let go of its formality,
of my wishbone
desiring juice -- its deep marrow,
muscle, and skin.
 
The sentence finally pronounced --
I am greedy for long drawn-
out vowels, for consonants that
desire lust, tissue, grey-cells.
I am hungry for love,
for pleasure, for flight,
 
for a story essaying endlessly — words.
A comma decides to pr[e]oposition
a full-stop ... ellipses pause, to reflect --
a phrase decides not to reveal
her thoughts after all — ellipses and
semi-colons are strange bed-fellows.
 
Calligraphy of veins and words
require ink, the ink of breath,
of blood — corpuscles speeding
faster than the loop of serifs ...
the unresolved story of our lives
in a fast train without terminals.
 
I long only for italicised ellipses ...
my english is the other, the other
is really english — she has no english;
her lips round / in a moan --
oval, rich, nuanced, grammar-
drenched, etched letters of glass.

About the poet

Sudeep Sen [www.sudeepsen.net] is widely recognised as a major new generation voice in world literature and ‘one of the finest younger English-language poets in the international literary scene’ (BBC Radio), ‘fascinated not just by language but the possibilities of language’ (Scotland on Sunday). He received a Pleiades Honour (at the Struga Poetry Festival, Macedonia) for having made “a significant contribution to contemporary world poetry”. Sen’s prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Distracted Geographies, Rain, Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Ladakh, The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), and Fractals: New & Selected Poems|Translations 1980-2015. A new book, Blue Nude: New Selected Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) is forthcoming. His poems, translated into twenty-five languages, have featured in major international anthologies; and his words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Herald, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on bbc, pbs, cnn ibn, ndtv, air & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf/Random House/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), and Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell). He is the editorial director of aark arts and the editor of Atlas.