Part 53

Posted on by Rajani Radhakrishnan

How can you express loss? A word, a colour,
a line in an empty square still occupies space,
still casts a shadow. Write a number, a constant,
unmoved by the variables around it. Feel it sink.

There are people who stumbled, who fell,
who broke. And there are people who
kept moving: no trembling lip, no averted
gaze, no hurriedly corrected misstep.

Look inside them, like through a kaleidoscope,
slivers of grief shift in random geometric
patterns. Dip your fingers into their despair.
Feel the sharp ends of unboxed alphabets
ripping your flesh. Feel their denial, soft like the
outside of a lip, warm like the inside of a thigh.

Ask them. Not about what they lost. It is too
late for that. Ask them about semantic
paucity, why there are no adverbs for the
vacant spaces in the night sky. They might
tell you about the arbitrariness of time. Ask
them about maya, the world, an artifice that
is ever-changing. They might tell you about
nimbus clouds. Ask them about consciousness,
the bracket that con(s)t(r)ains life and they
might tell you about the duality of the ordinary.

If you had come to me, hands bleeding, your
questions fielding impossibilities, sorrow
arrayed in your eyes like cubic doubt, asking
about the physics of being, I might have told
you about Ghalib, his ḥasrat-e parvānah, how
the candle weakens, how the flame wavers
at the terminal longing of one foolish moth.

18 thoughts on “Part 53”

  3. So loss has been on my mind this week (as can be seen in my poem) so this one really spoke to me. Add another one to my favorite’s list from you. There really aren’t any adverbs for vacancies in the night sky. Just the word, gone.

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    1. Thanks Rommy. Losing a person, or a relationship, or just anything precious – yes the word is just “gone”…. an irreplaceable void. So sorry for your loss. Hope you can hold the good memories close and feel better slowly.

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  4. Raj, I liked reading this as it brought back some sad memories.
    We do heal though, like a bloody wound, there remains a scar.
    Mother Nature is good. She makes us to feel better every we get a whiff of her healin breath.
    Not sure I will pull through with mine, we’ve been married fifty years.
    I would like for you to come back and read mine again. I didn’t want my poor cow to die, SHE butchered the puns that she tried to tell
    Sorry.
    ..

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  7. If absence is a verbal lacuna, there is yet a vocabulary and poetry for loss, grief, the low hallows one must tread. While I doubt if you’d “Ask them about semantic paucity” you’d get much of a response from folk made inarticulate by loss, for the sake of analytic discourse folded into the lyric coursing of a poem (a difficult enough challenge), it serves to speak for what they “might” say, filling in with what only poetry serves. Problem for me is, grief is never about the mind, it’s a traverse through the low country of the heart. Yes, just like moth and candle, longing and expiring are one; our grief is a necessary product of that; but I doubt it’s of any consolation to the aggrieved. But that isn’t the point here, is it? Some pretty wide contradictions set up in the course of this poem and show the difficulty mind and heart have sometimes talking to each other. Kudos for the attempt.

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    1. Thanks for the close reading, Brendan. I think those suffering will hardly share their story of loss with those that come to them without a bleeding heart and empathy. All they will get are the contradictory answers. Not only is loss hard to articulate, it also waits for the right ear. Mind and heart, just like you say.

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  8. Wow, Rajani, this is as powerful a poem as loss itself. The flame wavering at the terminal longing of one foolish moth is simply brilliant.

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