Poems: Of Quiet Goodbyes, Departure And Global Warning

What sound do you hear when your loved ones leave? What if the sluggish earthworm burrowing the earth get cemented?

Ravi Shanker N

Updated on: 5 March 2022 12:41 pm

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Of quiet goodbyes, departure and global warning.

Silent Farewells

When things start leaving you
they don’t say bye.
Silently, they leave in a row.

My dad did not say bye
when he died.
My mom did not say bye
when she died.

My house did not say bye
when it quietly collapsed.
My garden did not say bye
when it went under water.

Finally, my love my love
my love did not say bye
when she left
when she left.

When I left me
I left quietly
leaving no trail of good-byes.
But I heard a violin from afar.

(This poem got 110 translations in Malayalam, three in Telugu, two in Tamil, one in Kannada, three in Hindi, one in Magadhi , one in Punjabi, one in Kashmiri, two in Bengali, one in Assamese, one in Karbi, two in Odia, and one in Urdu. Also translations in Indonesia (bhasa), Italian, Spanish, French, German and Danish)

X-mom

(To my mom who died recently)

Mom had two hearts like two breasts.
One of stone and
One of flesh.
They worked alternatively.

On days when the pulpy one worked
She talked of my infantile jaundice days
When I turned turmeric yellow.
I would have died but for
A doctor named Adam Khan in Pazhavangadi*.

On days when the stony heart worked
She slept with a koduval** under her pillow
To protect us kids from potential enemies.

Till she died, she maintained
“A woman should always carry
A hack knife in her heart.”

On the night of her death,
I found it glowing in the dark
On an X-ray shot of her chest.

* Pazhavangadi: A place in Thiruvananthapuram.
** Koduval: Hack knife