Poems from Longitudes of Light by Nandita Bose
Who are You?
By Nandita Bose
I have no papers. My first home was placenta,
older than mankind and trashed on arrival.
Nomad homes collapse daily, leave no trace;
all playgrounds are of dirt, as all milk is stolen.
The price is high but it won’t buy an identity
that must show in what you do or break:
I grew up in a town called Babel, lisped mantra
in tongues with no script. Liars are pious.
Who are you? I was asked without grace
and my clothes offered excuses, no answer.
There is no god. Whom will I swear by?
I would rather have a raga in place of prayer.
Railway stations hurtle by my many failures:
tickets certify I have been there, bruised but smiling.
My blood is red, I am a child of a dozen races,
buried ancient viruses gurgle in my dna mix:
all addresses are mirages without water, birds know
even as forests move overnight across weeping lakes.
Alibi
By Nandita Bose
Regrets can be rabbits:
they multiply if you feed them greens.
The fear of drowning ends when tears dry up
and crows fall from banyan trees, thirsty
No one is so untouchable
their surrogacy or kidneys can’t be harvested
Truths are themselves untruths with a degree
perhaps, a lynch mob. In decades of learning
books surprise me less than people
Words have a way of being crushed
repeated till magic seeps out of them
their written form frailer
Smoke is a form of formless desire
and death often obliges
yet is not that permanent
Deep in a green forest, a million
seeds burst to life amid sunsets
When children are being white-phosphorus scalded,
where do you hide?
Nandita Bose misses nowhere, for her home is in the now, everywhere. Kanpur, Jamshedpur, Mumbai and Bangalore have been rest-stops, traversing all axes and facets of the India experience. Poetry offers Nandita refuge from her day job as fiction writer and critic. In Longitudes of Light, her second collection of poems, the world is viewed in fragments of interaction, personal yet hyper-connected to larger questions. Nandita’s past avatars have been in academics and in HR. The poet lives in Bengaluru with pets, plants and her people.