3 Poems, by Mukut Borpujari
Stoic
It's already summer, and we’re getting rid
of clothes, getting ready to greet
the scorching days ahead;
making the place airy and less cluttered.
We’re living on the edge, restructuring the house,
getting rid of the old furniture,
obsolete machinery and funny gadgets.
A small table in the kitchen for two. Our world is
changing, our wardrobes mostly empty;
gone are the skinny jeans and the fancy moccasins—
the windchimes and the trinkets.
When someone comes to visit and admires
our complete works of Yeats,
the peacock feather in the open thesaurus,
the mantle vase on a shelf, we say
take them. This is the most important
time of all, the age of dissipation,
knowing full well what we are divesting is
like the fragrance of a burning incense stick
that lingers hours after it has been doused.
An ordinary Friday afternoon
when one of us stared,
and the other one just laughed.
February
I’m crawling out of this season of hard cold winter,
That stayed long enough.
The bottom of my feet kicked up dirt on the hard asphalt.
When I planted a mango tree it smelled of green earth —
Pulsing sun, dirt, and water.
I do remember this. I pinned summer light upon my back
And made no apologies for the space I took up — \
Barely clothed and sun-burned.
Now, a ball of cotton in the grey sky.
The sun rolls low on the horizon, hangs,
Then dips behind a city block.
Wind howling us into the night.
Inside in the erratic rhythm of these flickering
Shadows and light,
I conjure up the potent sky of the longest day;
Seeds, with a whole galaxy inside them.
Cicadas vibrating outside
On the branches of a giant neem tree.
I never expected to find myself in such a cold place,
My hands dry out against the cold.
I let the memory out, let it linger on the horizon,
Some kind of flying like a kite — again and again.
I loosen the buckles of my mind to fly back in time,
To the days of dried out paddy fields, and herds of cattle —
I let it stay there.
The Krishnachura Tree
My neighbor had decided to chop the Krishnachura tree.
He is right, of course; the tree is over 20 years old, huge, sprawling
and spreading over the jagged road
like a giant umbrella.
It’s clearly a danger
tilting to the side of the house —
some feeble wind
my neighbor said could uproot it.
Every year, it sent out its bursts of orange blossoms;|
blooms and blooms,
blooms relentlessly;
throws shooting flames out into the sky
more stunning than fireworks on new year's eve.
Father, bed-ridden, lay motionless looking out the window,
gazed at the fireworks, his head on the pillow —
might have seemed like forever to him
who used to stomp around the neighborhood
watched that tree full of grey birds
chirping, chattering
flitting here and there,
and the other-worldly blazing petals
rhythmically waving against the wind.
My neighbor, true to his word,
brought an ax and felled the tree at its stump.
He was right, of course.
The shoot came back the following year, its
clusters are unflinchingly parading their
bursts of rebellious leaves; albeit,
where there was a canopy of flames
there’s now just a handful,
here and there.
One strand in particular
desperately reaching out to the window with a fistful of orange flames
where he was,
waiting patiently for its return.
Mukut Borpujari is a graduate in English Literature and a Masters in Computer Application (MCA) degree holder. Based in Guwahati, Assam, INDIA, his poems appeared in Mount Hope Magazine of the prestigious Roger Williams University (RWU), Bristol, RI, USA and New Feathers Anthology, Cerasus Magazine, London, UK, Copihue Poetry, The Chapter House Journal, Strange Horizons, Heathentide Orphans are other major journals and anthologies where his poems appeared. He was also long listed in Erbacce-prize for poetry 2023.