Taking Daddy's Photograph
Daddy’, I said,
‘Stand by those shoe flowers,
there are so many of them blooming this morning’.
Daddy took a step back.
There is a strange beauty,
in the hibiscus sheen, when, from the fresh green
the hundred shoe flowers mount red.
Daddy now looked like he was some God
coming to me in a dream of sacrifice.
He puffed hard at his cigarette,
its red butt putting all the hibiscuses
to shame.
Looking on into the camera eye, Daddy said,
‘Be careful, son,
The sun is still in front of you. Don’t let
in too much light’. I remember,
I knelt down, so the lens could take the
shade,
holding him right.
Dad smiled, as though in the camera eye
Lay his only woman.
And in that stained
Hibiscus silence,
Time
built a riverside chapel around us.
**
A Morning Rose
There was one in my small terrace garden today.
Garden, if you could call it a garden,
A few pots, a touch of a bright
Periwinkle drying,
One sad looking sunflower
And a bouquet of crimson
Bougainvillae.
Small blooms, as though a little shy
Of their own blossoming.
I haven't seen
The butterflies hover here,
Though there have been
Many midnight executions
Of waking seeds giving birth to their first leaves.
And now I see the one small rose, white as the side hood
Of a nun,
Bending down in thankfulness,
To the sun
Rising,
A resurrected Christ in the morning skies.
**
Driving at 2.A.M.
The macadam stretches brittle, rain-polished. Sudden light neonates the road studs,
Jeweling them in their hundreds, as darkness feline, fans over, lactating.
**
Home Front, One Morning
The sun skis down a shaft of cobweb laminating a spider, closely examining its insect juice.
Clouds courier the rest of unfallen rain over mountain tops in neat bouquets, delivering them to thirsting valleys instantly.
Flowers fall away like faces off another youth, of another time.
Wind-tapped, leaves move as quiet alphabets among the keyboard of lined trees,
As the first of the priest-storks lands upon the pew dust in Bible finish, elegant, among the rising prayers of wet morning dew-grass.
**
Bird on a Word
Bird on a word
Hopping over a sentence,
She has come
To take back something
She forgot
Searching an inflorescence
Where
She left a feather, the shining one. Taste the fruit, I said, Go on.
No, not that, the coloured one.
Word, waiting for your bird,
To hop on a sentence
And hide among the leaves of a stanza in the storm. Here she is.
Every part, an art.
Now she has come,
She’s searching every petal. Must be the cataract of the late mist.
Take your time, I said,
She can’t see
What she missed
What she left there,
Or why she came back;
Bird on a word
That returns to the moon,
Her liquid memory
Trembling every page,
As leaves
The night folds to late sleep
Upon rain trees.
**
Moon Metaphor
The dark has its share of brooding, and firelights.
All night,
Caught in the still fur of leaves
The moon metaphors
A haunting brilliance of arrested light chained to the star skies.
I’ve come this far
And I must not turn,
Though an angel flames
In the burning bush.
Slowly my thought
Returns to you
Like a lone meerkat to its home
To find its nest gone.
***
About Gopi: His seminal work “Father, Wake Us in Passing” won him a Poetry Residency in Augsburg, Germany where he read his poetry along with his German translator. He attended the MFA Poetry program of the Texas State University. His New and Selected poetry The Painter of Evenings appeared in 2018 (Paperwall). His latest poetry collections Swan Lake and Descent have just been released. He edited A New Book of Indian Poems in English and Living Poetry: Seven Contemporary Indian Poets in English from Kerala. His plays include life portrayals of the Nationalist poet Subramania Bharati, and Devasahayam, the layman from Kerala who was recently conferred sainthood. For a while, Gopi Kottoor reviewed poetry for The Hindu Literary Supplement and was guest columnist for Manorama Online. He is based in Kerala.
You can view more of is work here.
He edits the online journal Chipmunk.
