Translated from the Malayalam by Ra Sh
Uprooting him
You still peer at me
raising your freezing eye lids,
perched on that branch of winter.
There are many secrets,
many silences,
known only to me
in my heart.
I am scared that you are
smuggling them away
to some season of Spring.
I am sure you are
portraying those
violet flowers
in the Spring
with my secrets.
Whenever you look at me,
there flows from my heart
something akin to poetry.
Now, they will label my
private moments as flowers.
How secretly had I
stowed them away
inside my heart’s layers!
I had broken with you
long back when you were
telling me of your love for me
by the side of the lake.
The setting sun knows
the essence of solitude.
You don’t have to
observe me so closely
from the moment
you walked away
and faded into
the reddening sky
saying the sunset
entices me more.
I have hated for long
your magic trick of
kissing my wounds
to turn them flowers.
Let dawn break
after this night,
I will definitely uproot
that branch of winter.
Vanishing
I will vanish one day
like a magical poem
whose lines vanish
even as someone read them.
Ask winter whether
it had seen me,
it will lie that
it does not even know her.
Whenever it arrives,
all the summers it had
smuggled from my heart
scalding its lips, winter will
feign a loss of memory and
claim it had never seen her.
Ask the rain
whether it had seen me
and it will say that,
on its way somewhere
where it took a pause,
it had seen the signs of her
having rained relentlessly there.
Definitely,
as the lines of a poem
fading away while being read
one day, I will vanish for sure.
When you forsook me
When you abandoned me
it may not have crossed your mind
that solitude is a wild animal
badly famished
that being alone is a forest
that when one is alone
in the dense deep forest
days set early.
That a woman whose dear one’s
finger had vanished
will lose her path again and again
and turn into just a predator.
That solitude like a lame lion
will close in on the lonely woman
limping on its way.
That sadness will bare its teeth
and nails and eat her up
cell by cell.
A lonely woman
is a dead predator.
Don’t approach a woman
who has died of wounds
seeking again a molecule of life or
seeking life giving breath.
Long burned up and charred in her would be the jasmines
and under skirts of love.
From the forgetfulness of
any kind of insanity,
don’t rush in from your
winter cold to the pyre
of the memory of a woman
who has already set.
Don’t try to rename the poem
already translated as a wild fire
by labeling as Spring.
Don’t meditate on the groin
of a dead woman
for the Ilanji to blossom.
How much distance
she must have covered
measured in the distance
you walked away
before she wore the shroud
and lay down to sleep?
Don’t seek the moisture of memory
and the greenness of life
in her who died from the venom
of solitude.
Knowing that she who died wounded turning into poem named sunset,
whatever the distances
she walked alone
cannot be contained
in a single word called Love,
go back realizing that
it was the distance of life
that cannot be retrieved.
You should know that
if ever the city of love
has closed its gates to you,
it can never reopen them
being a city with just one gate.
About the Author
Smitha Sailesh is a screen writer and poet from Kerala, India. She holds a postgraduate degree in Malayalam and Journalism. She has published a poetry collection in Malayalam titled “Vasantham Pranayathinayacha Kathukal“. She lives with her husband Sailesh and daughter Almitra.
About the Translator
Ra Sh (Ravi Shanker) is a poet and translator based in Palakkad, Kerala. He has published many collections of poetry including Architecture of Flesh (Poetrywala), Bullet Train and Other Loaded Poems (Hawakal), Kintsugi by Hadni (RLFPA), Buddha and Biryani (Hawakal) and a chapbook In the Mirror, Our Graves, written jointly with Ritamvara Bhattacharya. He has also published a play Blind Men Write (Rubric Publishing).
His English translations include Mother Forest (Women Unlimited), Waking is Another Dream (Navayana), Don’t Want Caste (Navayana), Kochiites (Greenex), How to Translate an Earthworm (Dhauli Books) and The Ichi Tree Monkey.
