Poems by Robin S. Ngangom
In celebration of My Invented Land winning the Kalinga Literary Festival Poetry, English Book Award, here are a few of our favourites from the collection.
Excerpted below are few of Robin S. Ngangom’s poems from his celebrated collections, ‘Words and the Silence’ (1988), ‘Time’s Crossroads’ (1994), ‘The Desire of Roots’ (2006), and new poems.
To Poetry
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It was for the gift of words
that I went in search of you,
pure, anonymous woman,
with hope you’ll show the way
to a famished mendicant and
another drifting soul farer,
in fear none can fill the emptiness
that threatens to collapse
into a black solitude.
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I inverted each fallen leaf hoping
to find you tangled in dark river-beds, or
a city’s impenetrable rooms,
flowering on autumn boughs
away from an apostate’s hands, or
caught in a hunter’s web, and
wanting to free you so that you would
aim like an arrow towards my withering heart.
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I have walked stubble fields
of elevated earth, hoping to waylay you
with nude worship once you return,
homeward bound with mateless wings, and
pitcher around your waist, flowering
among yellow mustard with fleeting promises
in your eyes, of bright river clay, faceted lips,
when sunlight is flung across the shores
of a languid river.
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Again and again I heard your name
in the muezzin beckoning the faithful
tremble in the early fog
lying about a lonely city, your faraway voice
dissolving as bells from rustic temples.
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I who grew restless dallying with lukewarm waters,
weary of repetitive winds, I who unearthed
the meaning of woman to man,
know you wait there shimmering
at the edge of all my circling dreams.
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The Dead Shall Mourn the Living
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See the shadow-lips behind lace curtains
watched from the street; the impenetrable windows
and the sorrowing virgins silhouetted
by mute lamps; see the hurried clocks
between adulterous lovers and
the sheepish debris on walls.
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How many times have we seen
fire wilting in crystal brown eyes and
a slow cataract of hate forming?
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Look, childhood has died for that urchin.
He now lights his bidi in the dark noon and
bears a filial cross on his hunched back.
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The end touches us momentarily.
Its voices, its skeletal fingers,
its bone-chilling hoarfrost blanketing
yesterday’s hill.
Life filters through our bodies,
its gauze wings eluding our enclosing fingers.
It is no precious stone
we can hold and admire in the sun.
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See that tramp from my native land.
He has survived with only the wet streets
beneath his shoes-bereft feet.
He has no pillow to lay his head,
no fire to cook or warm himself and
he just beds down among obsolete machines.
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The dead shall mourn the living.
Never knowing who is better-off.
Mutually shaking their heads
in shadow-pity.
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Imphal
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I
Nothing has changed in this backdrop.
Boys with earrings
enter hairdressing saloons and
set their hair with dirty combs;
the maimed women with meager leaves
in the bazaars imploring pity,
the men lording over them;
and the girls everywhere,
spying from balconies,
on display with renovated faces
in streets, in colleges,
happy as beauty queens and then
the boys again, proud to drive their fathers’ cars.
But outdoing them all
the drug-fiends,
with bodies alive and
eyes dead.
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This is the ancestral ground
of the Meiteis.
A lottery of souls
is held here every day.
Sons, daughters,
with strength of elephants,
your homeland is on fire.
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II
I find winter each year
when I return like a dead ritual
to this gnarled land.
Here, I am both native and illegal migrant.
The minister is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
Yeah, though I walk
in the valley
in the shadow of Aids,
I will fear no man.
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III
There is something sadly inevitable
about this land, something inescapable,
like a beast which stalks its own death,
like an ominous prophecy
of men clad in red going to war,
like an arrow when released
seeks the man who strung the bow.
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Today, when everything seems to be
pointing again to prospect and fortune,
when no longer the minion of Empire
the fantasies of capital have come true,
when our arts strut in the streets,
when the entire nation recognizes us,
when our poetry is filled with paeans
of pluck and progress,
when our culture is put up for display,
something sinister sours
our fondest dreams.
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IV
Land of my childhood
I can no more pretend to love,
where I heard the bicycles
leaving in the morning and
a kitchen warm with smells.
I can be found hidden in a corner,
the soft boy with a fondness for epics
as some rowdy friends
plan the conquest
of a neighbouring territory;
one galloped a stolen horse
through a crowded bazaar
cutting the throng to pieces and
walked on to become
the marksman
of a subversive outfit.
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I should have been there
to keep track of hidden paths
that lead to the jungle,
the mazes that weave the heroic lore.
I should have monitored
the boys shot down and
counted the soldiers
they ambushed.
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I should have been there
in a deserted hamlet in Ukhrul
when every able-bodied male
fled to the nearest jungle and
only naked children
were left playing
with stolid old women.
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The Ignominy of Geometry
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The ignominy of geometry,
the inability to evade angles and parallels.
Living, we have to suffer that mortification
which robs the sacrifice of joy
of much of its sheen.
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One minute of patronizing certainty and
the boring man is a ‘square’
but when our understanding’s poor
someone’s off on a tangent, and
that dark excitement we all secretly envy
is an eternal triangle,
or, when two people cannot agree (naturally)
they are diametrically opposed,
bowing again to geometry,
a language of precision
to measure our imprecise lives.
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We were given a white emptiness and
left to our devices.
Wanting more from life than mere life
we tried to fill that emptiness
with lush pigments, beauty, purpose,
a finishing touch of children.
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We went looking for subjects in time and space
creating moments under cherry trees, lifting glasses to youth,
but merely fulfilled reprise’s oracle and
we speak of a wheel coming full circle.
The ignominy of geometry,
the inability to see beyond centres and triangles.
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Even my love was flesh and blood
because I had put my mouth on her lips.
Yet a wheel’s fortune disdained us and
we became two tiny points of light
on that white emptiness,
drawing unhappy parallel lines.
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Middle-class Blues
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A middle-class man
wakes up on a middle-class morning
and has his middle-class tea and biscuits.
Last night, he dreamt of being an aristocrat
but today he is afraid
of falling below the poverty line.
The middle class never begets rebels;
no one’s rich enough to feel guilty about the poor
or poor enough to reach that breaking point.
A middle-class man merely wants to save his money
troubling no one and expecting no trouble in return.
Though he fell in love during his preindustrial youth
he eventually married a middle-class bride
and dutifully buys his middle-class fish,
constantly checking his middle-class watch.
On occasion, he may wear his single suit
but you can tell him
by his body odour and his shoes
although he may drive his middle-class car
and build his middle-class house
after scrimping and saving
all his lowbrow working life.
And although the irony will be lost on him
it’s his money that keeps a democracy well oiled
because he pays his war taxes and earthquake dues
without a murmur of dissent.
And as grandfather grimbeard
who was buried in an English churchyard said,
many hold him in contempt
for his petty bourgeois ways.
Ah, it’s as well that the petty bourgeois
never became rich or noble
and were spared such delusion.
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My Invented Land
(after Mario Meléndez)
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My native soil was created from tiny sparks
that clung to grandmother’s earthen pot
which conjured savoury dishes
I’ve been looking for
all my life in vain.
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My homeland has no boundaries.
At cockcrow one day it found itself
inside a country to its west,
(on rainy days it dreams looking east
when its seditionists fight to liberate it from truth.)
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My people have disinterred their alphabet,
burnt down decrepit libraries
in a last puff of nationalism,
even as a hairstyle of native women
has been allowed to become extinct.
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My native place has not been christened yet
my homeland, a travelogue without end,
a plate that will always be greedy
(but got rice mixed with stones.)
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My home has young people
who found their dreams in a white substance
and the old that transplanted their eyes,
it has leaders who have disappeared
into their caricatures.
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My home is a gun
pressed against both temples
a knock on a night that has not ended
a torch lit long after the theft
a sonnet about body counts
undoubtedly raped
definitely abandoned
in a tryst with destiny.
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Postcard
(for Nigel)
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To bear the fate
of the crossing alone,
drink bitter brew by yourself in ports.
Only the bravado that comes
to put off a savage loneliness.
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Will the Ceredigion sun be as kind when
the archdruid lies under an englyn of leaves?
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Remember the night that lay fastened to a ship’s deck
when he and I returned after seeing Penelope.
Glasses purloined from a midnight café,
iridescent stars above the sea’s boulevards,
winking until a dawn awash with unearthly shades.
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I read his obituary again, contrite enough
to want to visit his grave, and come to listen
to Arthur’s blood lapping your stones.
Featured image credit: Tarun Bhartiya.
