☀ Today's Poem: "Poem with a Grimace" Lakdhas Wikkramasinha

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1 year ago

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August 29, 2023

Today, I must thank you;
wherever you are I know, black
sand's clogged your throat. Look at the sugar-ant—
a terrifying grimace on its face,
wringing its feet, feeding on my memory: all
that I have of you.
All that I have of you—
a picture: three sisters, a father & your dead mother.
This evening, as always, they must
wear their fine masks of derision,
twisted with lies—But your impossibly antique
features, the time-shaped
purest flesh under your dress
once held in my hands, jabbed at
like a woodpecker, was my
inheritance.
One day perhaps
a poet will speak
your splashing arms, of the dead
man who wrote the green
columnar plantain trees,
of bunches of golden plantains, maybe
of the trembling
finger-like leaves
before your window—
(there were too, two
calamander chairs, a plant-pot & two
dusty hands, with candlesticks
before the piano—your mother's).
Once I had sat on the oldest throne
in the country, heard the peacock scream
inside my head:
I had drunk of the Castalian
fountain the Latin poets called
the source of all inspiration.
They over-rode all that—but your sleek legs
facing me—the landscape I lost ...
the endless banter leaping on my shoulders:
swords, guns, the broken shaft
of an impaling stick
thrown in the garage, & ever angry,
your mother's: "We are not criminals!"—
I think the river-lamp's gone dead that I
carry to light the small
anecdotes swimming inside
my head—Mandelshtam, beaten to his knees
in prison, is what I wanted to say—is dead. I
have three book-racks. I go tramping
remote temples now, peering
at old murals crumbling to dust.
The fruitful bats in their screeching concert
never see them as the elephants bring
the rains in. For the monsoons were built
five roofs here.
I see the sun on a red column
& the blue monkey sitting on it.
I know nothing of you—
the guns are ready, grenades piled high, bayonets
gleaming. They say, we are not the first,
we are your friends, & we shall not be the last—
A cluster of areca trees are beautiful
when you come upon them in a grassy clearing.
Leeches suck away the bad blood from my face.
Wars fought then were different, but they
still go on—They still
go on.

from the book LAKDHAS WIKKRAMASINHA / New York Review Books

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Forward

Navigating Form and Structure: An Interview with Taylor Byas
"Dr. Taylor Byas extends that lineage with her debut collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, which showcases an assured poet exploring weighty concepts of home, identity and the past, sonically, lyrically and playfully. Byas revels in poetic structures, both as complement and friction to subject matter, and this collection offers a dynamic array of constructions, which never get in the way of the content and craft."
via CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS

READ ALL TODAY'S HEADLINES

What Sparks Poetry:
Dana Levin on Reading Prose
"I thought instantly of two books by philosophers who have offered me enduring lenses: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard and I and Thou by Martin Buber. Then I flashed on the bowl of dead bees at the end of Robert Hass’s famous poem."

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