A
Nightmare
Three old men
Warm themselves
Around a fire in a cold night.
They keep flinging into it
Young men and women
To keep it ever aflame.
They keep pressing them down
With their heavy walking sticks
So that they do not get up and run.
Once-in-a while they sip
Babies’ blood from their goblets.
Bite into their well-cooked limbs.
Laugh playing their guitar
To the tune of mothers’ screams.
They sing hymns to Satan ,
Hold the heads of the youth like globes,
Dance around the fire,
Reveal their golden gangs
And plan the next war.
They make excellent bombs
Distribute awards to arms dealers
Who make the best bombs
To be dropped over houses and hospitals.
They themselves manufacture and export
Drugs for injuries and burns
Tear off peace pacts, redraw
The frontiers on maps
Wipe off some nations.
Three old men, naked,
Warm themselves around a fire.
That fire spreads across the earth.
My Readers
A fisherman who goes to the mid-sea in rain,
Fails to get any fish and returns with
A netful of sky, a lean girl who sits hunched
In front of a kerosene lamp and dreams
Of biscuits falling from her textbook,
A tribal who goes to the forest,
Cheats the bear of its honey that fills
His clay-pot along with his grief,
And comes back to his cottage to sit down to read,
An eighteen-year-old who carries
A baby, a passing lover’s gift, thinks of
Ending her life, gives it up
And hums a popular lullaby,
A middle-aged man who had thought
His disease was his life and
Finally sought solace in his death,
A youth who tried to learn Sanskrit
And now stands aghast with his watch
That stopped working after its
Clash with its grammar,
A mountaineer who descends the heights
Along with the wind and fills a song
With the rays of the sun,
A globe-trotter who roams six continents
And travels to the warm continent inside him
To escape the cold of the seventh,
A thinker who, ceaselessly meditating on climate-change,
Turns into a burning summer,
And a clever god, who, having created all of them,
Hides feigning innocence, and secretly thinks
Of creating a whole new universe.
(2025)
Bird, Sky
The bird is the sky’s.
When she roosts on the bough
the tree thinks she is hers
The bird is the sky’s.
She nestles and lays eggs
so that she might offer her
offspring to the sky
She knows she will lose her sky
if she spends too much time
in the leaves’ shade; knows too fruits
just provide her the strength to fly off.
The bird is the sky’s.
Her language is of infinity
She speaks to the wind and the clouds
just with a cooing or two.
The sun shines on her wings
The moon dangles from her beak
Stars descend to land on her tail
You can clip her wings and cage her;
still she would dream of the sky
and attain salvation in that dream.
Give her milk or fruit and
she would still sing the sky.
Awake or asleep, she keeps on flying.
Think a while: the sky is not
outside but is inside the bird.
Look close, and we can see it
inside us too.
(2017)
Author’s Bionote:
* Koyamparambath Satchidanandan (b.1946) is a bilingual poet, critic, playwright, editor, fiction writer and travel writer. He has been a Professor of English and of Translation Studies, , editor of “Indian Literature” bimonthly and “Beyond Borders” , a SAARC literature quarterly, the executive head of the National Academy of Letters and invited National fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, He has thirty-two collections/selections of poetry in Malayalam, ten in English, seven in Hindi, and thirty collections in other languages including Arabic, Irish, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese besides all major Indian languages. He has won sixty-one literary awards - including the National Academy award, Dante Medal from Italy, Poet Laureate Award from Tata Literature Festival, Bombay, five awards in five genres from Kerala Sahitya Akademi besides the topmost awards for poetry and total literary contribution from Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. He has read his poetry and lectured at several festivals and bookfairs in over thirty countries in six continents and translated poetry from across the world. He has also edited dozens of books in Malayalam and English besides several journals. His latest books of poetry in English include “While I Write” (Harper-Collins), “Misplaced Objects and Other Poems” (Indian National Academy), “The Missing Rib, Not Only the Oceans” ( Poetrywala, Bombay), “The Whispering Tree”, “No Borders for Me” (both Hawakal, Kolakata), “I am a Language” ( Dhauli Books, Bhubaneshwar), “Questions from the Dead” ( CopperCoin, Delhi) and “Singing in the Dark” ( ed. with Nishi Chawla, Penguin-Random House, India. His selected essays on Indian literature, “Positions” was published by Niyogi Books, Delhi in 2020 and a collection of resistance writing, “Words Matter” edited and introduced by him came out from Penguin Random House in 2018. “Greening the Earth”, an international anthology of eco-poetry edited by him has also come out from Penguin Random House in 2023 along with “The Wasteland: An Indian Response”, a collection of essays from Orient BlackSwan. His name has appeared more than once in the Ladbroke list of the probable Nobel Prize winners. Already a Fellow of the Kerala Sahitya Akademi, K. Satchidanandan is now the President of the Akademi.