Copypoetry (1)

 

Raised Wrong 

Four poems, 
three poets 

The Hunchback in the Park 

The hunchback in the park
A solitary mister
Propped between trees and water
From the opening of the garden lock
That lets the trees and water enter
Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark

Eating bread from a newspaper
Drinking water from the chained cup
That the children filled with gravel
In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
Slept at night in a dog kennel
But nobody chained him up.

Like the park birds he came early
Like the water he sat down
And Mister they called Hey mister
The truant boys from the town
Running when he had heard them clearly
On out of sound

Past lake and rockery
Laughing when he shook his paper
Hunchbacked in mockery
Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
Dodging the park keeper
With his stick that picked up leaves.

And the old dog sleeper
Alone between nurses and swans
While the boys among willows
Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
To roar on the rockery stones
And the groves were blue with sailors

Made all day until bell time

A woman figure without fault
Straight as a young elm
Straight and tall from his crooked bones
That she might stand in the night
After the locks and chains

All night in the unmade park
After the railings and shrubberies
The birds the grass the trees the lake
And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
Had followed the hunchback
To his kennel in the dark. ❑

Dylan Thomas 
published 1946 

I Can’t Tell You How To Read 

It could just be that I invented my first memory
When someone, three years ago, asked me what it was
Nothing before that day has survived though
And it happened, really it did

Sofa propped against the window
Fat legs folded ’gainst the sofa
That I could see a white car from
That I didn’t know was old
Which was ours now
On the grey street with the short trees

Which was in Barkingside, the Milky Way
And a language just considered could now be thrown away
And for a while, my mother replied when asked, S​ abzi wala?
And then I knew shorthand for whole oceans
Not my mother, tongue smother, another, brother

A decade I was petty and two years, I was going to be fine
Everything of the house smelled of calamine
Weighed 2700 kilograms and went on a ship
I saw it in the lorry but not on the ship
And when it came (in) it became home
Which was where they had taken us in the first place

But home, c’est les autres
I fell by occident. There is a sweating Paris
In West Bengal. Which has no Eastern counterpart,
Which is pressed up against an Eastern wall
And I could speak the language

But his pocket’s got a lodestone, innit
Which came from the earth
And knew nothing of money and trains
And was tugged anyway
Like moths to their deaths

I might stand in the night
Once the morning has come the sound of the fan
The sun makes dust huff
The water runs dark when I am done

Which gorgeous summer was replaced, by half a season
Then I knew a few refrains
As trips of the tongue, dances for Mahamaya
Syllable one, two, three, four—no one, three, two, four

Then glorious grammar! or an x-ray machine
The shops the streets the road the sky
And the horns even in the house’s womb
Thrum with a language I can see
Why did they call it a grammar school?
I can see that it makes sense

It was tough and I was tired
The mosquitoes let me sleep
I slept still with a blanket and did not dream a word
The walls, so close, are uselessly apart
Next door the dog started to bark and I could hear it

In my ears, nose and throat,

In its kennel in the dark. ❑

Sampurna Ghosh 
23r​ d ​ April 2014 

 

Pantomimesis 

There are things you cannot fathom.
This is not about being doped up watching time expand.
Nobody can really fathom the universe expanding, but you can imagine.

I tried to imagine my negligence in the universe,
not able to put my finger on how I had this body,
this name, this consciousness and not another’s. Not my thoughts,
but my mind itself behaves like a child, uncertain of when to use past tense.

How can someone be too young when every moment is their oldest?
I wasn’t too young when lying awake at night,
Claudius dripped family secrets into my ear, that later I’d find my blood curdled.

You train your voice
like anything else, with punishment and reward.
Wind me up and make me sing until I’m sure I’ve learned to ignore stage fright.

I am gifted and talented. Nobody will call me stupid or lazy.
I would never drink or smoke or have sex before I’m too young.
Thank god I believe in god and she knows the path that’s best for me.
But it can’t involve moving to India. I am not like my cousins.

I can’t be gay or trans or depressed.
I won’t hurt my body even when it hurts me.
I will not abuse others as I have been abused.
Everything I thought was wrong. I suppose I was too young to know.

Only after I knew, these things were always true and
I don’t believe in linear explanations of cause and effect any more.
I don’t know which is more inevitable:
words sealing my fate or sealing up tape over moving boxes,
Cardboard time capsules with no date set to open them.

The show must go on, although I don’t remember learning any of the songs.
People tell me I sing well. I don’t remember the colour of their eyes.
I am distracted by all the chests buried in my garden.

I treat every tree like the first and last one that has ever grown.
When the fruit shrivels up before it has a chance to ripen
Then I realise that coffins fall apart
and what grows in that ground is contaminated.

Time has built a treehouse out of bricks of my past.
I am surrounded. The branches have been ripped out of context,
but they are more structured in death than they ever were in life.
I almost believe I will never be old enough,
Brave enough, to dig up the lead-lined boxes that nearly killed this tree.

My first real monsoon washes away the earth. They sit in the open.
The ground is littered with dead stalks and thorns.
I sleepwalk and for months, my legs are covered in cuts from blades of grass.

I still don’t know what I am doing when I stand up,
blood drying on my legs like the first time I grasped that this was my childhood.
Something pushes me to push the boxes to the side, into the shade.
Somewhere, I register they are far bigger than I recalled.

I knew the seasons had changed when a northern wind started blowing.
Sometimes I imagine the boxes are really crates full of fruit from my orchard.

But for now they are furniture,
and I lean against them to smoke,
knowing that whatever is in them is behind me. ❑

Shaan Ghosh 
18​th ​ June 2017 

 

I Remember, I Remember 

Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed. 'I was born here.'

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been 'mine'
So long, but found I wasn't even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
'Was that,' my friend smiled, 'where you "have your roots"?'
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I've got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn't spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
'Really myself'. I'll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and 'all became a burning mist'.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn't call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead -
'You look as though you wished the place in Hell,'
My friend said, 'judging from your face.' 'Oh well,
I suppose it's not the place's fault,' I said.

'Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.' ❑

Philip Larkin 
8​th ​ January 1954