A. K Ramanujan Poems In English, A. K Ramanujan All English Poems, A. K Ramanujan All Poems English, A. K Ramanujan All Poems
A River
In Madurai,
city of temples and poets,
who sang of cities and temples,
every summer
a river dries to a trickle
in the sand,
baring the sand ribs,
straw and women’s hair
clogging the watergates
at the rusty bars
under the bridges with patches
of repair all over them
the wet stones glistening like sleepy
crocodiles, the dry ones
shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun
The poets only sang of the floods.
He was there for a day
when they had the floods.
People everywhere talked
of the inches rising,
of the precise number of cobbled steps
run over by the water, rising
on the bathing places,
and the way it carried off three village houses,
one pregnant woman
and a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda as usual.
The new poets still quoted
the old poets, but no one spoke
in verse
of the pregnant woman
drowned, with perhaps twins in her,
kicking at blank walls
even before birth.
He said:
the river has water enough
to be poetic
about only once a year
and then
it carries away
in the first half-hour
three village houses,
a couple of cows
named Gopi and Brinda
and one pregnant woman
expecting identical twins
with no moles on their bodies,
with different coloured diapers
to tell them apart.
Astronomer
Sky-man in a manhole
with astronomy for dream,
astrology for nightmare;
fat man full of proverbs,
the language of lean years,
living in square after
almanac square
prefiguring the day
of windfall and landslide
through a calculus
of good hours,
clutching at the tear
in his birthday shirt
as at a hole
in his mildewed horoscope,
squinting at the parallax
of black planets,
his Tiger, his Hare
moving in Sanskrit zodiacs,
forever troubled
by the fractions, the kidneys
in his Tamil flesh,
his body the Great Bear
dipping for the honey,
the woman-smell
in the small curly hair
down there.
Chicago Zen
(I)
Now tidy your house,
dust especially your living room
and do not forget to name
all your children.
(II)
Watch your step. Sight may strike you
blind in unexpected places.
The traffic light turns orange
on 57th and Dorchester, and you stumble,
you fall into a vision of forest fires,
enter a frothing Himalayan river,
rapid, silent.
On the 14th floor,
Lake Michigan crawls and crawls
in the window. Your thumbnail
cracks a lobster louse on the windowpane
from your daughter’s hair
and you drown, eyes open,
towards the Indies, the antipodes.
And you, always so perfectly sane.
(III)
Now you know what you always knew:
the country cannot be reached
by jet. Nor by boat on jungle river,
hashish behind the Monkey-temple,
nor moonshot to the cratered Sea
of Tranquillity, slim circus girls
on a tightrope between tree and tree
with white parasols, or the one
and only blue guitar.
Nor by any
other means of transport,
migrating with a clean valid passport,
no, not even by transmigrating
without any passport at all,
but only by answering ordinary
black telephones, questions
walls and small children ask,
and answering all calls of nature.
(IV)
Watch your step, watch it, I say,
especially at the first high
threshold,
and the sudden low
one near the end
of the flight
of stairs,
and watch
for the last
step that’s never there.
Read More : 100 Brilliant General Knowledge Question With Answer
Elements Of Composition
Composed as I am, like others,
of elements on certain well-known lists,
father’s seed and mother’s egg
gathering earth, air, fire, mostly
water, into a mulberry mass,
moulding calcium,
carbon, even gold, magnesium and such,
into a chattering self tangled
in love and work,
scary dreams, capable of eyes that can see,
only by moving constantly,
the constancy of things
like Stonehenge or cherry trees;
add uncle’s eleven fingers
making shadow-plays of rajas
and cats, hissing,
becoming fingers again, the look
of panic on sister’s face
an hour before
her wedding, a dated newspaper map,
of a place one has never seen, maybe
no longer there
after the riots, downtown Nairobi,
that a friend carried in his passport
as others would
a woman’s picture in their wallets;
add the lepers of Madurai,
male, female, married,
with children,
lion faces, crabs for claws,
clotted on their shadows
under the stone-eyed
goddesses of dance, mere pillars,
moving as nothing on earth
can move &mdash
I pass through them
as they pass through me
taking and leaving
affections, seeds, skeletons,
millennia of fossil records
of insects that do not last
a day,
body-prints of mayflies,
a legend half-heard
in a train
of the half-man searching
for an ever-fleeing
other half
through Muharram tigers,
hyacinths in crocodile waters,
and the sweet
twisted lives of epileptic saints,
and even as I add
I lose, decompose,
into my elements
into other names and forms,
past, and passing, tenses
without time,
caterpillar on a leaf, eating,
being eaten.
Extended Family
Yet like grandfather
I bathe before the village crow
the dry chlorine water
my only Ganges
the naked Chicago bulb
a cousin of the Vedic sun
slap soap on my back
like father
and think
in proverbs
like me
I wipe myself dry
with an unwashed
Sears turkish towel
like mother
I hear faint morning song
(though here it sounds
Japanese)
and three clear strings
nextdoor
through kitchen
clatter
like my little daughter
I play shy
hand over crotch
my body not yet full
of thoughts novels
and children
I hold my peepee
like my little son
play garden hose
in and out
the bathtub
like my grandson
I look up
unborn
at myself
like my great
great-grandson
I am not yet
may never be
my future
dependent
on several
people
yet
to come
Prayers To Lord Murugan
(1)
Lord of new arrivals
lovers and rivals:
arrive
at once with cockfight and bannerâ
dance till on this and the next three
hills
women’s hands and the garlands
on the chests of men will turn like
chariotwheels
O where are the cockscombs and where
the beaks glinting with new knives
at crossroads
when will orange banners burn
among blue trumpet flowers and the shade
of trees
waiting for lightnings?
(2)
Twelve etched arrowheads
for eyes and six unforeseen
faces, and you were not
embarrassed.
Unlike other gods
you find work
for every face,
and made
eyes at only one
woman. And your arms
are like faces with proper
names.
(3)
Lord of green
growing things, give us
a hand
in our fight
with the fruit fly.
Tell us,
will the red flower ever
come to the branches
of the blueprint
city?
(4)
Lord of great changes and small
cells: exchange our painted grey
pottery
for iron copper the leap of stone horses
our yellow grass and lily seed
for rams!
flesh and scarlet rice for the carnivals
on rivers O dawn of nightmare virgins
bring us
your white-haired witches who wear
three colours even in sleep.
(5)
Lord of the spoor of the tigress,
outside our town hyenas
and civet cats live
on the kills of leopards
and tigers
too weak to finish what’s begun.
Rajahs stand in photographs
over ninefoot silken tigresses
that sycophants have shot.
Sleeping under country fans
hearts are worm cans
turning over continually
for the great shadows
of fish in the open
waters.
We eat legends and leavings,
remember the ivory, the apes,
the peacocks we sent in the Bible
to Solomon, the medicines for smallpox,
the similes
for muslin: wavering snakeskins,
a cloud of steam
Ever-rehearsing astronauts,
we purify and return
our urine
to the circling body
and burn our faeces
for fuel to reach the moon
through the sky behind
the navel.
(6)
Master of red bloodstains,
our blood is brown;
our collars white.
Other lives and sixty-
four rumoured arts
tingle,
pins and needles
at amputees’ fingertips
in phantom muscle
(7)
Lord of the twelve right hands
why are we your mirror men
with the two left hands
capable only of casting
reflections? Lord
of faces,
find us the face
we lost early
this morning.
(8)
Lord of headlines,
help us read
the small print.
Lord of the sixth sense,
give us back
our five senses.
Lord of solutions,
teach us to dissolve
and not to drown.
(9)
Deliver us O presence
from proxies
and absences
from sanskrit and the mythologies
of night and the several
roundtable mornings
of London and return
the future to what
it was.
(10)
Lord, return us.
Brings us back
to a litter
of six new pigs in a slum
and a sudden quarter
of harvest
Lord of the last-born
give us
birth.
(11)
Lord of lost travellers,
find us. Hunt us
down.
Lord of answers,
cure us at once
of prayers.
Self-Portrait
I resemble everyone
but myself, and sometimes see
in shop-windows
despite the well-knownlaws
of optics,
the portrait of a stranger,
date unknown,
often signed in a corner
by my father.
Still Life
When she left me
after lunch,I read
for a while.
But I suddenly wanted
to look again
and I saw the half-eaten
sandwich,
bread,
lettuce and salami,
all carrying the shape
of her bite.
The Black Hen
It must come as leaves
to a tree
or not at all
yet it comes sometimes
as the black hen
with the red round eye
on the embroidery
stitch by stitch
dropped and found again
and when it’s all there
the black hen stares
with its round red eye
and you’re afraid.
