Meditation of One Left Behind
From my large window
the expanse of the inlet
shrank when a black ship fringed with red
docked, blocking the sunset
and I wondered about this
dark rover of the ocean
instead of the gold rover of the cosmos.
This was Mattancheri harbor.
And now years away from that scene
I now see photos on my phone of gutted buildings
and the ferocious beaks of tanks jutting
across the horizon blocking
our view of history that my kin
left to embrace in Moshav Nevatim.
We did not see the beginnings of wounding
but only the expanse of the desert and possibility.
They saw the sea of blue disappearing
into indigo bringing out the stars,
now perhaps fewer in the smoke.
We were seduced by “one people”
“better place,” “home,” “promised.”
We winced when the British cut India’s artery.
We did not see the severance in Zion.
Both were too far away to scathe us.
Now, my littleness creeps into this conflict,
my wonder ploughed by disenchantment.
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Soft Animal of the Body
Curling into the soft warmth of my bed,
I know this is what I long for, believing
in a bed to sleep in under a roof, rain-adorned.
Safety and comfort, when snatched
is a war on limbs cold and torn, yearning
to curl into the soft warmth of a bed.
Body without spirit is like a tent flapping in the wind.
Cold ground. The sky, relentlessly exposing the detritus.
Where’s a bed to sleep in under a roof, rain adorned?
Gaze at your family who once you had warmed,
look for geese or any bird or animal migrating,
curling into the soft warmth of your breath’s bed.
Know the imagination you once treasured,
seek out beauty in the familiar that’s breaking
the once-known bed under a roof, rain adorned.
Know that love exists, that good lies buried,
despite the forces storming and eroding,
curl into the soft warmth of your breath,
a bed to sleep in under a roof, rain adorned.
Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island (2013-15), is the author most recently of Exile is Not a Foreign Word (Copper Coin 2024) and Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics (Rowman and Littlefield 2024). We are Not a Museum (Finishing Line, 2022) won the New York Book Festival award, in the poetry category. Her earlier books include Thirtha (Yuganta 2002) Behind Dark Waters (Plain View 2008), Draw Me Inmost (Stockport Flats 2009), Trace (Finishing Line 2011), Thirteen Days to Let Go (Aldrich, 2015), Slow Ripening (Local Gems, 2016), and The Singer of Alleppey (Shanti Arts, 2018), She has performed her poetry internationally, has authored numerous essays on poetics, and was the 2011 Walt Whitman Birthplace Association Long Island Poet of the Year. Her critical essays on Dalit poetry appear in journals such as the International Women’s Studies Journal. She leads writing workshops at many writing and holistic health organizations. She is the co-director of Matwaala: South Asian Diaspora Poetry Collective, and is Professor Emerita at SUNY Nassau.