Poems by Ruth Vanita

Sestina: Conversing with Anand
for Anand Thakore
 
He’s quizzical about metre and rhyme.
Should I admit that they have had their time?
Like the gods, and love, and other old-fashioned things,
They pass, and yet I’m looking out to sea
Where the ship returns, where the ship has always been,
Though hidden by fog, sailing bravely on.
 
The rain comes down, the rain goes on and on— 
This, he tells me, a poet writes, without rhyme
Or reason, and is applauded. We’ve been,
Meanwhile, sparring, smiling, passing the time,
Afloat on the uncertain, unnerving sea
Of new acquaintance, considering things
 
To reveal, conceal, half-remembered things
Retold to please, to build a bridge on,
Though no bridge can span that unshared sea,
A past uncommon, unchiming, unrhym-
ing, thrown up in fragments, boiling, from time’s
Murderous spring, where no foot has ever been
 
Known to tread; all we have is what we’ve been
Drinking down for years, happy far-off things,
Keats, Kalidas, Housman, gifts of time,
Names to conjure with, cling to, bring on
The voyage unknown, beyond rhythm, rhyme,
Meaning, purpose, wherever blind seas
 
Carry us, migrating birds rocked, sea-
Borne, perhaps back to where we’ve always been,
Or came from, in the unceasing rocking rhyme
Of worlds turning, dissolving, reshaping things
Inexorably rushed on, forever on,
Down churning, muddy rivers, crashing in time
 
Against one another, parting, meeting as time
Decides, but flung out, always flung out to sea.
This conversation could go on and on
But can’t; I have to return to where I’ve been
Living in two countries, among scattered things
Regathered, trying to love, to work, to rhyme,
 
To throw out a thread from what has been
Against time, against the encroaching sea
Against the tide of things that do not rhyme.
 
 
April Surprise 

April will surprise you yet, she said.
Surprise—a plain dish with a wondrous core.
Hard to recall the life that these supplied,
Consuming violently its own undoing.
Not joy but dread the midnight call now wakes— 
The positive report, the heart besieged,
Impetuous loss that must break down the door,
The phone unanswered ominously ringing.
Take me not captive, April, let the field
Lie fallow, growing daily grass and weeds,
Show me familiar things, no dazzling light,
Comfortable darkness, less, not more,
Before the long-expected last surprise.

Ruth Vanita’s first novel, Memory of Light, appeared in 2020, and her second, A Slight Angle, will appear from Penguin in 2024. Her first book of poems, A Play of Light appeared in 1994, and her second, The Broken Rainbow, in 2023. She is the author of many books, including Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in Modern India, and a book on Shakespeare is in press. Her most recent translation is My Family, the poet Mahadevi Varma’s memoir about her animal companions.
 
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