Anantha Sundaram

Again, Small Bang

I

Something blew me down

Face up? — I cannot tell.

I, tree, not of face kind

lay wondering if it was

another limb that slew me —

the wind that once

parted night clouds

to point my starry mothers —

my umbilical ropes still intact,

where the dark’s knife missed

I tried clearing the limb

splayed across my trail,

as others had before

in her name — Umba (divine mother)!

breathing my gaze,

holding it

Again

Am I being birthed?

Am I ending?

Life’s tug is as firm as

the end’s pull

Amma feeds

Child nursed by accidents

Time fattens on shreds

not threads, the stitcher

Interrupt::Begin

A sapling sways

feebly in the wind,

And the old, ripe,

swings confidently in fall —

gravity urges new destinies, for

incidentally unborn

Three Bars

Android is fully charged.

Early day here, time there

already brushing against

a new moon — reset

— slate ready to receive

words for my dead

“Our priest, peer — his

spirits undimmed by

his macular degeneration”,

speaks into my WhatsApp

line, “Ready-a?”

“bainng-gnng,” a wheeled

life honks past him —

“I am on a bike, pillion-la”,

he reminds, earbuds snug

under helmet, riding behind,

on his protégé’s Honda Activa

“apavithraha pavithro va” —

“Impure or pure …”, he chants

marking out my states in their

likely order, pausing for my echo

— his entire sensory benefit drawn

in crisp aural notes — he listens

and corrects me, “Illai (No)!, repeat

after me”

“Vasu, Rudra, Aditya“,

three generations’ parched  —

thirsts — invoked, then quenched,

a palm drop of water and

a thumb of black sesame,

offered by their future, in

his most probable condition,

directed to each forebear

precisely by the pillion rider’s

immaculate recall —

“Visalakshi … Gomathi… Meenakshi…”

mothers summoned for

begetting a son or abetting

in a grandson

The roll-call cuts in and out

of static and traffic, the share

reducing with time spent dead,

great grandfathers, grander and

lesser sires finally crushed to,

“… my ancestors from

either lineage, may they be satisfied” —

“trupyatha trupyatha trupyatha“

Axi-Om

Om

we

w e break

we form

we rise

we we scatter

wewe stutter

time quakes –

call chiseling fragments

reunite as joy

scatter-sand

in the storm

weee hold close

grains in stealth

devalued we-alth

rooting in light

dusts in space

we other

we emerge

rivers to stream

the six scream

streams to thought

keening

be

Anantha Sundaram is a bilingual Tamil-English poet based in Houston, Texas, and Clinton, New Jersey with roots in the streets of Mylapore, Chennai. A chemical engineer by profession, he writes under his full name. His poetry often applies typographic and morphological fracturing of Tamil and English words to generate simultaneous layered meanings. His work has appeared in Muse India.