Poems :: Radha Chakravarty
Where Rivers Meet
Where rivers meet there is no quiet.
Listen to our clamour.
We call out in different voices.
Our colours clash. See how they run in-
to each other. Where hidden currents cross,
shock explodes in spray and foam.
Wild encounter: feel the thrill.
I am a river, in search of other rivers.
In my torrents, stories surge, driven
to find other stories.
Where rivers meet, our narratives mingle.
A new story starts.
A great new river charts its course,
shapes rocks, breaks shores,
unmakes history, remakes mores.
Estuary. Our great river stretches wide
her open arms, and rushes out
to the open sea, where all voices, longings,
colours, tongues, stories, songs and tears flow in-
to each other. Wave upon wave,
our many voices swell, surge, and roar,
in a vast, unceasing clamour
for all our stories to be heard.
Memories of Loss
In a seashell held to the ear
the murmur of a distant ocean
In the veins of a fallen leaf
the hint of a lost green spring
In the hiss of logs in the fire,
the sighing of wind in vanished trees
In the butterfly’s bold, bright wings,
The trace of silken cocoon dreams
In the cracked, parched earth,
The yearning for a lost monsoon
In the filigreed finesse of ivory,
the agony of a dying elephant
In the fragrant phial of musk
the bottled anguish of a deer
In the sheen of a marble floor
the heartbreak of a mountain rock
In the pressed flower between the pages
the story of you and me
Alien
In my body, I sometimes feel at home,
sometimes an alien on a strange planet.
Skin the wall that holds me in, lets me touch,
feel, explore the surfaces of what’s not-me.
Flesh and bone, brick and mortar of my being,
these bones, the shifting scaffolding of this,
my strange abode. Arteries and veins,
channelling the pulse of my home’s life-blood.
Netwwok of nerves, the wiring: synapses
spark, in electric flashes of awareness.
These eyes, my windows to the world;
I close the shutters, find another world within.
The heart, a locked door: it yields, sometimes,
when I find the key.
This house, my woman body,
has many chambers. In the red room,
the floor heaves, walls bulge and curve,
the air swirls with explosive yearning.
In the room of memory, spectres cling
and lunge, and ghostly voices clamour—
echo chamber, threatening to implode.
My womb is where the unborn future
lies in wait.
In the hall of mirrors, at night, I see,
new-grown fangs, and forked tongue,
twisted talons, serpents writhing
in tangled hair, black hollows for eyes.
In the mirror, is it me I see, or an-
other, my own dark twin, alien, trapped
here, in this lonely planet, this body?
At the threshold of my consciousness, I hover
between worlds, between me and not-me,
knowing the way in is the only way out.
Designs in Kantha
Sewn into soft, worn layers,
forgotten fabric of grandmother tales –
patterns of the past,
secret memories, hidden designs,
intriguing patterns in silk strands
dyed in delicate dreamy shades—
embroidered story-lines
in exquisite, dainty kantha-stitch.
Years of laughter, heartache, bliss,
tears and yearning, rage, despair—
worked by artful needle into
guileless fictions of innocence,
pure and tender baby love.
Fleet fingers, fashioning
silent fables, designed to swaddle
innocent infant dreams, shielding
silk-soft folds of newborn skin
from reality’s needle-pricks,
abrasive touch of life in the raw.
(From Journal of the Poetry Society of India. Vo. 31 & 32, 2020-2021)
*The poems published here have appeared first in “From Subliminal: Poems by Radha Chakravarty (Hawakal Publishers, 2023).
Radha Chakravarty is a poet, critic and translator based in Delhi, India. Her poems appear in the anthology Subliminal: Poems and numerous journals and anthologies, including Journal of the Poetry Society of India, Contemporary Major Indian Women Poets, Borderless, among others. She has translated major Bengali writers including Rabindranath Tagore, Bankimchandra Chatterjee and Kazi Nazrul Islam, and edited several anthologies of South Asian writing. Her books of criticism include Feminism and Contemporary Women Writers, Novelist Tagore and Mahasweta Devi: Writer, Actitvist, Visionary. She contributed to “Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem” (Muse Pie Press, USA), nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2020, and was nominated for the Crossword Translation Award, 2004. She was Professor of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi.
