Hiraeth Series
13
The seller has included a river
bubble wrapped - I realise
soon I open it. City's defunct sirens
announce Nine and the tide time
at that exact moment.
He has sent the item wrong as well.
I wobble and somehow
manage to hold
the urn for ashes sent instead
of the Floating Frame for photos
I have ordained.
I hear those sirens. My toes seek
the land inside as if
the outside is the the new in.
14
Silence bows it a few hundreds
watermilfoil heads to the whim
of the wind. My toes play with
the moist grass, and you giggle.
The abandoned mask in the mud
draws our attention. We chant,
"We can begin again. We can. We can't."
The sentences sprint in a circle until
they're devoid of any meaning.
Imagine, from an enormous invisible bowl
I draw some meanings from the lot swirling
inside and try to match those with our queries.
We do not really imagine. Our eyes map
the water and weeds and the mask where
ends the land.
15
My brother's grief follows him
to his daybreak toilet
and to our kitchen filled with
claustrophobic aroma of coffee and bread.
Atrophied, I know him,
he grasps for anything that may
haul him by his senses, anything
like those scents, benevolent wrinkles
in the dark cliffs of pain.
The tune our mother has left free
in this household roams shedding
its tickling notes everywhere.
We sneeze a song. I put words
on the tune quite different
from those of my brother's.
16
From the penumbral cave
of one halted building
a bunch of eyes stare at me
still huffing and puffing
from a close encounter with rain.
I disappoint them - neither
a man with money nor
a dealer with crystals.
I have heard people take home
a pocketful of eyes and free
them in a glass cage with cookie crumbs
pollinated walls, and on the powerless
nights watch them light up
blinking good stories from a bad neighborhood.
17
Near and far from the incarcerator,
and near and far from our brother
good memories ambush the rotten ones.
What are you burning to forget?
Everything between the zilches.
Now the one is gone.
The code of the remembrance-
zero, zero and zero.
Did we remove all the metals from
his heart? Late evening crows scratch
the sky - that poorly polished firmament.
18
This the same water?
Remember the time
we went to stare
at the eye of a spider's web
too near the water
and slithered into the current?
We had water burn
in our lungs and
marks on our skin.
Our flesh would remain
wet for years to come,
and even now when
some psychotherapist shakes
our heads water gushes out
through our nostrils.
Remember? Of course it is
a rhetorical question.
The gale of one spider
blows strong and strange.
Our parents asked,
"What did you learn?"
'All is in the web' -
would be the answer
albeit silence seemed adequate.
19.
Window leaves a dozen leaves
on my rain damp bedsheet.
I have nothing for a return gift.
I begin to sing.
The tunes are mostly unfixed.
On a piece of barbed note
I stumble and bleed memories.
Tim's mother
made us a rice platter, and that
had a distinct rusty iron nail flavour.
The blood still stains my toilet bowl.
We sang a thanksgiving song
that evening, were thankful
to be able to leave our houses
in a not so distant future.
20.
Someone's left the fence gate ajar;
the herd struggles to stream through
as far as possible from the bell jar,
from this ranch, rank and this rot.
In the yellow ochre storm
one single tree lassoes for breath.
I state, "Fever runs amok, Doc
Whenever I urinate love escapes
my flesh - that fire, algid mold, rusty nails.
"You transgress and trespass
the territories of metaphors,"
Doc declares, "mix and match."
A thermometer sparks like a cattle prod.
The sun sets in the wilderness of the West.
Wolfpack Contributor: Kushal Poddar
A Poetry Series by Kushal Poddar “Hiraeth Series”
Poems 8-12 from “Hiraeth Series” by Kushal Poddar
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.
Fevers of the Mind 
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