Counting

Counting is what
we do all our lives,
how much ever we deny,
we keep counting our days,
hours and breaths,
counting the medals
or grains of rice
husked out of
avaricious poverty ;

We do count the votes
for our apolitical existence,
day by day, and count
the rashes and abscess on
our skin, or the violence
or the childhood taunts
we grow up with.

There are some assets
we count and let them
multiply in the four
chambers of our heart;
we lets wounds fester
and hurts double,
we brew and ferment them
in the cauldron to hate
then to savor the taste
of the wedding at Cana.

We writers count each
syllable, letter and word,
every published manual
to sold books, and we count
our days towards immortality,
We are Sibyls drying up
in our jackets, we are
open to affront and interpretation,
we count them and
treasure them as our weapons too.

Counting murders, how many:
heads chopped, dead in
bomb blasts, raped and mutilated;
we count progress, muffling
low tides, counting crisis,
crimes and catharsis

we count every step
etched in neat ascending
curves,
even when the descend begins
we count up the neat steps
of ascend,
 I too have counted on your love,
counted your sighs, how many times
you made and proclaimed love;

till I compressed my landscapes
toned down by exuberance
chiselled my routines
and deleted my dreams
to start dreaming of the stars
and the eagles guarding their freedom,

I have stopped counting ever since
I painted the tarmac with rainbow
hues, wondering where exactly I would go.

Memory Vials

Memories are mountains
memories are molehills
they change from shape
to shape,
They ask for what you
want before the change.

Memories are snakes
they are rancid and stale
they eat you out  slowly
with their
venomous act of remembering
before fizzling out
into the world of the dead.

Memories can be gardens
 weeded-out  beauties
balances of imperfection
symetrically
shouldering the burden
of the planets of your pasts.

Memories can be manipulated
or stored in your hide to
ferment
to be smelt, tasted
savored or spat at your own will!

Reaching Out

Once I tried not to reach
my father's world of letters,
his poetry, his politics,
specked with his chain of
coughs and sputum, constantly sprayed on his life

I disproved his
universes, believed
thoughts can be born
free, without precedents
blood ties or  even without taking root in the past.

Now, in my parenting
singularity, I see him
herd my children like
a limping shepherd
before he switches off in the evening

I see him mess up the
dining table with his letters,
notes and broken poems
written about his  broken self,
salvaging every letter like a strand of sanity .

His childhood is new to me
his strong stubbornness difficult
to tame, his worlds opaque
like the glasses of his irises
voices hardly reach the shell  of deaf enlightenment

His evenings, doused with the
darkness of impending  nights, spirits and
disillusions, do not embarrass me
anymore, I see my sagging skin
resemble him more now,  at last when, I reach out to him.

Our Guilt Trips and Their Exodus

Published in Postcolonial Text, Vol 5, No 4 (2009)
Babitha Marina Justin



They have come from the hills,
flooding the plains; cooks,
waiters, coolies, masons.
Called ‘Neps’1 en masse,
this generic term deceives
their skin, tanned by sun,
and molten tar, they foster the
arteries of our growth.

By the rivers of Tsangpo,
Padma and Brahmaputra
Tears deluge to more tears
They search for Zion
in these callous plains
We search for our ‘civilized’
traces, call them ‘primitive’ ;
their women are lissome, men
do not ‘threaten’, we praise their
candour, honesty and dimensions!

By the rivers of Tsangpo,
Padma and Brahmaputra
Tears deluge to more tears
They search for Zion
in these callous plains


As the thought pendulum swings,
we fear their kukris at night. We
wonder if they bear portable home maps
behind their smiles to check and crosscheck,
if their folks still live safe and
huddled in memory's tattered rubble.

By the rivers of Tsangpo,
Padma and Brahmaputra
Tears deluge to more tears
They search for Zion
in these callous plains


They are angels again at sunrise,
when they leave for summer,
we believe they have a mule’s spine
to load and unload the nightmarish
burden a nation that clings to our skin.

By the rivers of Tsangpo,
Padma and Brahmaputra
Tears deluge to more tears
They search for Zion
in these callous plains

They have spread like slick over the sea,
their memories stay and never leave without
a trace. Have we not had enough transferring
our guilt in lieu of patronage
we dole out in coffee spoons?

Christmas Disorder

Every Christmas
I bury pasts
in my memory grave,
bleached white by the
hygiene of forgetting .

It's either a memory
or a relative,
of late due to an excess
of both, I have even started
burying decorations,
plastic Christmas trees,
stars and torn baloons of
yester year.

Something handy has to be
there to be rituallydug
and disposed of, along with the
abstractions of
memories and bleached bones.

The Toughest Part of Life

The toughest part of life
is to wade the gravity
of your silence and row
ahead to a dark unknown,

Then to read your lips with
my blind hands just to know
that you are silent ,
the toughest part is to know
that love is just the fear of loss
a crack of hope in despair's horizon

My longing and loneliness
which would fall apart
if I don't preserve
its last broken shard