Poems by Rochelle Potkar
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Abstruse
Light fell through one window in a house, once bending through a thicket Rooms drowning in mirage-like silence, its inhabitants seeing alphabet debating in diverse languages with visions turning rods and cones. Rooms with lesser light had shadows flickering, in the braille of grey with books melting into roots as ancient knowledge drew out superstition. They held books upside down, forming new letters and language. Rooms in total darkness made from shapes of fantabulism. Now inmates met in the common room (sometimes) as bedfellas. Beings of Dark lusted for fruit. Clashes don’t need a vocabulary. The Darkroom people used gibberish, the Lightroom, polemics. The dining room was in half light, recording these mismatches barbaric or warmup . . .? as the Darkroom people amplified dread the Lightroom people argued over synonyms. unease. terror. jolt. bogey Then one day the Light itself retreated leaving the mansion The people of Light couldn’t go back to the Dark. So the people of Dark inherited the whole house. And this happened in every corner Of every earth. The metamorphosis of the moth is in the murmur of the flame. Salmagundi sometimes everything merges like the violence on the Manipuri women like the podcast I chance upon that says why women’s voices are marginalised in Games, STEM, and on social media and how they were the first ones—the marginalised Black Women who started the Metoo movement. the Chipko women of the forest stood with lanterns in the day and when the policemen laughed at their stupidity, they said the lanterns were for them because they couldn’t see the truth of the forest that it wasn’t the capitalism-wealth of felled tree logs but a mother that fed water, earth, soul, sky. sometimes it all merges the mental ill-health of women screenwriters their daily hustle for rent and dermatologists as they escape reporting sexual violence for the sake of mental peace because mental ill-health is on both sides of reporting or non-reporting, speaking or staying silent, getting trolled or staying immune— mental health like a see-saw . . . sometimes these women’s pain reaches me as I squirm in my cocoon: the stupidity of life’s school, earth’s school where all the hours the timetables and syllabi change. that sitting alone on the second last bench writing this essay an ocean gets out of me so I can be the conch shell I always used to be. then they say it’s one short life in which things this extrapolated, this expansive get to be— a long stretch of beach, a lengthening horizon a seashore from Marina to Pondi in ever-growing shades of Vesper. they have the gall and the balls to speak on theories of relativity: scale ratio proportion all math that was essential philosophy spiritual quantum: genesis. and then i stop crying because someone somewhere who had a bad-corner day stopped with his or her melancholy and nodded their furious heads making further peace with this irrationality and not for once thinking of what i know: that you don’t always bend in front of or genuflect to reality that sometimes you make it . . . you make it bend to You. for no matter how unrelenting it all is even David had just five stones in his pocket for Goliath’s bleary third eye. |
Rochelle Potkar is a prize-winning poet, author, and screenwriter based in Mumbai. The author of Four Degrees of Separation (free verse), Paper Asylum (haibun), and Bombay Hangovers (short fiction), she is an alumna of two international writing residencies: Iowa’s Internatinonal Writing Program and Charles Wallace Writing Fellowship, Stirling. Her first novel and third book of poetry is due out in 2024.
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