Five Poems by Tapas Mohanty

Riot

Down the street

Next to a dairy, they huddled together

And fired 3 shots.

Through the window, you could see

the artefacts of violence strewn around;

Curdled and stuck

To the road

A pair of bloodshot eyes,

Silent, swollen, crooked lips

And blooming on the lips

hieroglyphs of an ancient nation.

That nation once had come in

My dreams and promised

Peace for my child.

It is gone forever.

Children of sand

 

I haven't stopped thinking

about those faces. Unsure about

How they look, I draw eyes,

Nose, lips and decorate them

With bruises. 

Then I draw hands, big enough

To cup those faces in their palms.

A hundred strokes of screams, of sulphur,

Of laments;

I scribble anger somewhere in between,

And manage to find a place for tears

To flow.

These years have taught me

How to hold back a storm.

I climb the hills of agony,

Where, on the top

I bury the unsaid.

Under my feet, I feel the hunger

Of the earth.

 *For the children who lost their lives in a war.

About writing a poem

 

It is not easy to write

A poem; it's not

A familiar thing to enter

A dark alley,

Without light, feel around till

You stumble upon something

Extinct, dig it up with dignity

And lay them bare for

Everyone's eyes.

Once you are done, you

Wonder if that thing is alive, 

Or half dead,

If it would talk or 

Babble,

Or just wriggle back

Into the past like

An Earthworm.

Retrospection draws

Its labour from 

your very breath.

Angst

 

The rage, the storm, 

The giant swirls of anguish,

The relentless thumping march

Of elephants inside my head

Are the only constant.

My brows pull down, threatening

To split my head open 

In perfect symmetry.

And so, I conjure up

Lines; behind the curtains

Of mad eyes,

I cobble together prose, poetry,

Or anything that could accept

Red-hot words, desperate punctuations,

And abrupt geographies of tones.

Once done, holding the scene of crime

On my tongue, I spit

It all out

Like a cannonball.

Rage

 

Does anger need 

a guttural vowel?

Does it need to froth

And foam through

The teeth, or do I need

To carry embers

On my tongue?

A man, lynched to death

By a mob of famished hands

Crawled among the headlines of a newspaper,

and vanished.

(They gave me no name but

His religion, to fix a God to his face.)

Last night I met him,

A familiar face,

scrawling his name on 

My door.  

These days, the poems 

hang like corpses

From a tree of unspoken words,

swinging,

their bellies swollen with

Rage.                                                                 

*On the lynching of a person from a minority class.

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About the Poet:

Tapas Mohanty is a poet whose work deals with the landscapes of life experiences and memories. His works have been published in several Indian journals. He is currently employed as an engineer in Hyderabad and is a photographer and poet whenever he has time.