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  • Dreams of Iron and the Hurt of History
  • Jayanta Mahapatra (bio)

Old Things To Talk Over

The last light of the sunkneels with pride once againon the rice paddies and village housesthat lie beyond exhaustion.Martyrdom is the faceless enemywho marches on, thief in the night.Blind words needlessly spoken aloudin the marketplace come and go,tasting blood at times,into silent funeral.

In a hut, hardened by unforgiveness,an old married coupleraces to the surface of time;they are forgotten, like many others,like the last emperor of the Moguls,or a pair of worn slippers hoping somedayto suffer the chaos of fulfillment.

A rainbow lying in the dewat her feet, the dutiful daughtergets ready to fall in love again.Unending silence fills the horizon.Once, maybe Grandmother, blind,or blinded then by ritual or cruelty,could feel her wayin touch with her own lostness;today the blood faltersin the narrowing veins,and the fatal threshold has been stepped over. [End Page 545]

Darkness spreads.Outside, deserted cow-paths waitfor something that does not come;the earth is doomed once againto the breathing of torn fields.Just the stale smell of last week's ricegrows within the walls.

A Full-Moon Night

Often a summer full-moon night has no storyto tell: Of no match to strike in a gas-filled room

or no lined-up villagers to be shot by militantsresembling a ridge of palms against an unreal sky.

Not even of the emptiness of a butterfly in metamorphosisor of a stench on which to found some meaningless poem.

But the hero of this story has done no great crime;perhaps small indiscretions or at times a lacquered lie

that presses down the sad prophetic answersto questions as when a rapist crushes a cowering child.

So this story shall try to pick up a few brave words,when even without a voice we could lose them all:

a story delivered from an empty stage to no audiencebecause history is anchored by a dream of iron that rusts away.

The real hero could be just another woman who sitswith her knees drawn to her chest, her baby propped

against her shins, hunger withering her impotent flesh,with the old old behemoth of faith set in Sita's lineage. [End Page 546]

But there is no other story here; only the flagrant painof wanting nothing more, no rights or longings or loves,

as she unfurls her guts, washes her thirsty shadows,and drops the unfinished dream of wearying grandmothers

onto the hour; while the full moon falls asleepover the weary river before they can mate and break free

from the secret morning held unhealed in their throats.

Night

I wait alone in this quiet house,the cry of the caged parakeet silenton the raw rising wind.Maybe it counts on my goodnessto help it escape beyond the needto lean on the night alone.

In the paddy fields beyond,a daughter of the villagelies mutilated and dead,looking unbearably lonely out there.

And I don't knowwhat I am waiting for.For tonight every daughter is dead.The pale moon drags our shadowsin a scene of angry sorrow.

Fathomless, into my roomcomes the cry of the parakeet,and I wonder who is lost among us?The night walking around the housein flowered dreams, its footfalls [End Page 547] falling across the empty lotsof my childhoodin its uncanny distance.

In the First Rain and Death

A whole wave of stars strangling one anotherupsets the dance of a lacework of fireflies in the first rain—the June evening a drunken bully of the neighborhood—as time rises up from the hospital dark, the walls,and from a soaked empty bed about to leap at the throat.

How do you set your little heart going?With charity evenings, parties for the wounded,or with the sweet weight of memory escaping from the bodylike a maharajah going off to war for a good time?How the mind is made up to...

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