Poems by ​Rabindra K Swain

I Wouldn’t Call Them a Litter
 
She does not know
where to make her home.
As it rains hard,
 
she keeps shifting them
from the sand-heap
to the pit she has dug
 
in the open garage.
The next time you see them,
they lie cosily under the culvert.
 
Your tongue wouldn’t turn
to call them a litter.
They are only five. Any day
 
they could become fewer—crushed
under wheels
or washed away in a downpour
 
that levels the drain and the road
for the children to float
their paper boats.
 
But is it not that it’s you
who had wished them gone,
those scrawny, mangy little ones?
 
Why do you wince now
as your neighbour complains
that the mother has brought
 
into his yard
the lifeless bodies of the last two
and would not let the crows
 
peck at them? But when
she is at your door again
wagging her tail as if to ask
 
if you know what has happened
to her, you quietly enter the house
to bring her a loaf of bread.
 


​
An Invite
 
Invited to a poetry reading
you wish you could come up
with a new poem
 
as Ezekiel did with his
“Night of the Scorpion”
that made him survive the sting.
 
One such thing occurred the day
you were in your 109th shade of grey,
pepping you up with a small talk.
 
Small talks, in fact, tickle you
contrary to your claim
they rattle your nerves.
 
You are in your elements
when your fingers are spikes
displaying your skull on Rajpath
 
and your poetry is a bludgeon
to smash your heads,
one after another,
 
ten in all. Your goal:
to feel
the pulse of your Lord.
 
This asking for the divine
throws you off-kilter,
makes you feel good
 
as, for the present, it does
for you to be among the poets
whose works you grew up with,
 
which made you spring or shrink
depending on the presence of humour
or melancholy in your spleen, depending
 
on what you glean from the field
to make them your own, and declare,
you are the lone survivor.
 

About the poet

Rabindra K Swain(1960) did M.A. in English literature and PhD on the poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra from Utkal University. Susurrus in the Skull was his fourth collection of poems and Temporary Address and Other Stories by Ramachandra Behera was his fourth collection of translation from his mother tongue literature, Odia. He has published poems in such periodicals and anthologies as The Times Literary Supplement, World Literature Today, The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Westerly, The Caravan , Chandrabhaga, HarperCollins Book of Indian Poetry, Ten: The New Indian Poets, and Eight Odia-English Poet. He lives in Bhubaneswar, Odisha, India.