De Souza Prabhu
No, I am not going to
delve deep down and discover
I’m really de Souza Prabhu
even if Prabhu was no fool
and got the best of both worlds.
(Catholic Brahmin!
I can hear his fat chuckle still.)
No matter that
my name is Greek
my surname Portuguese
my language alien.
There are ways of belonging.
I belong with the lame ducks
I heard it said
my parents wanted a boy.
I’ve done my best to qualify.
I hid the bloodstains
on my clothes
and let my breasts sag.
Words the weapon
to crucify
Eunice de Souza, Maharashtra
(Eunice de Souza (1940–2017) was an Indian-English poet, literary critic and novelist. Among her notable books of poetry are Women in Dutch Painting (1988), Ways of Belonging (1990), and Learn From the Almond Leaf (2016). She published two novels, and was also the editor of a number of anthologies of poetry, folktales, and literary criticism.)
Gadapa (Threshold)
Pedavva cried her last words,
“Gadapa duram, khaadee deggera”
Gadapa is the site of our experience
always nearing almost touching like a wish.
It is where you will find our land,
which we neither own, nor belong in–—
Women slapped against walls nailed with frames
of ancestors & blessing gods,
sit at the gadapa
talking with the neighbouring women.
Hanumavva with more than tobacco-packet in her bosom
waits at the gate
for more than a bus to the next village. Nagaraju
traded his body for some touch at the bank where the stillborn
are let in the river Mogulappa cried.
The women who raised me accuse me
of appropriating & violating their carework of loving.
I love like it’s the only skill needed to survive
in this country–—
I can’t love like your men.
A blind bull tricked, left on its own
in the crowded Monday bazaar.
Pedavva cried like the waves of flood that transgressed
into our thresholds with all its laborious force
on 26th July, 2005.
She entered life like the waves
to collapse a home built to bury her body.
Like gutter flood she broke in through the roof & cracks,
claimed from the toilet drain.
Now squatting across the line, skillfully sifting
the city sludge in sieves, we strained no gold.
Only a wasteful amount of soil, soggy cooked rice
& plastic. Just like our dreams
of breaking the world & the Mithi streaming
with flamingos—
Shripaad Sinnakaar, Maharashtra
(Shripad Sinnakaar is a poet and a researcher from Mumbai. His poems have appeared in The White Review, Dalit Art Archive and Mumbai Urban Art Festival, and are translated in Telugu and Marathi. He runs a literary project called Flamingos in Mithi. He is working on his forthcoming collection of poems.)
