Poems—Mini Babu

Mini Babu is working as Associate Professor of English with the Dept. of Collegiate Education, Govt. of Kerala and now working at BJM Govt. College, Chavara, Kollam, Kerala . Her poems have featured in anthologies, journals and magazines. Her collections of poems are Kaleidoscope, Shorelines and Memory Cells. Her co-edited collection of poems is Meraki and Glass Bangles.

MIGRANT

Children gathered leaves, peacock feathers
and chocolate wraps,
and left between pages.
The leaves shed their green,
the feathers persisted in-situ
and the chocolate wraps lost shine.
That was what my mother and
her mother and all mothers did.
Later on, when they dwelt on roots,
they mused on leaves, feathers and wraps.

A migrant deserts his shadow
in the village of his childhood,
villagers cut through it and walk around,
when a mate or an acquaintance
or an enemy cuts through,
he turns tender,
as a leaf, a feather, a wrap.

Migrancy is, "the unbearable lightness of being, "
at what place, you trade yourself,
still incapable to do away with the traded,
you swing around, round and round,
to get rid of the traded,
only to come upon it reverting
as blood spots to Lady Macbeth.

Every time you detach your roots,
it bleeds,
as Earth first bled on original sin,
native as of Adam's,
and that which sticks as grass to the soil,
every rain, waters it to flourish.

I KNOW WHERE LOVE LIVES

 

I know where Love lives.

Love lives where the road ends.

I have seen her

walk to the stream

that borders her home.

 

As soon as, I got reassigned

To the city,

I moved around

Looking for a house

at what place, the road ends

and that which borders a stream.

 

Not that my village home was so,

but the thought,

somewhere,

sometime,

I ought to dwell as Love

and walk to the stream

as she does

and teach myself

what things to do at home

and up and down the stream.

 

LADY SISYPHUS

 

Every night after the house sleeps,

she grooms herself for dreams.

The premiere on the run

is that of her rolling a boulder up a cliff

and gradually letting it roll back,

triumphant,  she claps her hands

and laughs whole-souled.

Disturbed, her mate turns aside.

Somewhere in his dreams,

a woman laughs uncontrolled.

 

First in the morning,

she sweeps her yard

and collects pebbles to a corner.

She daydreams of them

ripening into

boulders for the night.