A Poetry Series by Kushal Poddar “Hiraeth Series”

Hiraeth Series

1

Nothing, in sooth,changes;
nothing does;
the shapes and shades though
may differ a dash.

Mine is the azure hue; shades
in its neighborhood and apart,
jotted in the dirt; 
you know - in the matter
of dream and heart.

Eyes shut I see someone
saunters, and the water shivers
as if the fever it runs
has climbed up a stiff ridge.

Again I see this. This again.
Wherever you go 
the same narrative depicts
this life with a few pen-throughs.

2

The canal,
tree,
        one falcon
        between the blinks.
For no reason
I stare-lock a muddy cigarette butt
thrown away by some stranger
here.

3

"What are you starting at?"
"An abstract." Says my father
standing in our yard
without his glasses, with
his narrowing vision.

Everything is a soul,
fleshless, out of focus.

4

The tweet draws my attention
to one bird,
and now my eyes and my mind
are that bird -
one and single and nilch 
and an egg 
and a fledgling too shy to fly 
for the first time or the last.

5

A parcel of birds and a sycamore
seek morning's crisp air,
and at first,
nothing else ants its way 
into my brain, nothing,
no thought bearing
the buzz of money, health or weather.

Then one red buss speeds past
our pro tem shelter by the broad bad road
reminding everything in crazy waves.

6

Forgive the parrot.
It vomits the word-lumps
human fed it.

                        Forgive it for
                        cussing and narrating
the tales from the back
of the household coop.

I leave a lean and soggy green chili
at the parrot's place.
Sadness levitates the veg.
It floats between two kinds of gravity.

7

Two tired girls 
lower their bundles of fire-wood 
and pitchers of water
to rest near the slope of the dry canal -
the odor of rot bothers them not,

and they fold their knees
as if they are synchronised.
They do not know death sniffs their ankles,
but scurries away without biting. 

8

He floats through and through
the woman crying
and bleeding by the crushed sedan.

I switch off the neighborhood
and the siren careening,
and yet a white noise sizzles.
The sound reminds you
of a cruel cigarette burn.
One moment. Eternity.

"How long were you lost?"
Later the woman will ask her memory.
"Overnight perhaps. Perhaps never."
It will answer.

Kushal

A Short Bio: An author and a father, Kushal Poddar, edited a magazine – ‘Words Surfacing’, authored eight volumes including ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, ‘A Place For Your Ghost Animals’, ‘Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems’ and ‘Postmarked Quarantine’. His works have been translated in eleven languages.

Wolfpack Contributor: Kushal Poddar

Poems 8-12 from “Hiraeth Series” by Kushal Poddar