Time’s Cruel Tentacles: Two Poems by Abhilipsa Sahoo
Photo: Karan Madhok
‘Once, I was a little bird slowly blooming out of the warm embrace of the nest to learn the taste of first flight, believing that distance was proof of growth. Now I’m just plainly tired of being the burnt-out lamp on my parents’ windowsill’
Order of Things
If you ever feel your life’s a tornado juice whirring
inside a bottle being shaken by time’s cruel tentacles,
think of your wall—a wall, which, like any other wall,
tends to wear the weather of multiple worlds—
both intrinsic and extrinsic to the house,
each carrying its own moon-tides
of crickets, its stray morning-beams
of birdsong, its much shallower noons holding
nothing but the tall, brittle grass and the rustle
of their ache. With the passage of time,
the wall’s long chest is marred by uneven blotches—
microcosmic clusters spanning several realities
pressed into layers of plaster. Somewhere,
inside its crevice, a brother ant must be learning
the slow grammar of fatherhood ahead of his time.
In a galaxy of lichen, nearly two dreadful storms
away, a mycobiont will befriend a new alga.
Until then, a ladder leans against this wall,
intimate and patient as an unfinished prayer,
as though, if the wall had ears, the ladder,
like its ancestors, would be a whisperer—
its rungs thirsting for a fresh wash of turpentine,
collecting dust. Flakes of old paint sway from them
like small wings. Sometimes, half-finished strokes
stutter down the surface of this wall. Somewhere
near its belly, a window sits like a god’s dormant eye—
a nonchalant archivist, under whose watch
nothing goes unobserved. And if you ever fail to seek
the quiet vortex of your storm, hold on to this moment
of stillness just for the sake of seeing the world spin
from the eye of the swirling chaos. Look at how
everything around you here that has gathered
and still, unwaveringly, continues to, insists on
rehearsing permanence, as if the future were nothing
but a repetition of orbits falling into place,
as if the only order of things is their being.
*
Sources of Light
Outside, the crackers have been bursting since five in the morning. Inside, the noise sparks a nerve in my upper compartment like a scintillating fuse of a firework that is about to go off. The plug has loosened again, like my will to leave the bed on another festival-crowded working day. Yet I move against the wind of my own unwillingness to replug the fairy lights—my grumpy face further creased by the burden of such tiny rebellions. The fairy lights work again after a clockwork of miracles, and light up something inside me—a dark room filled with the soft debris of plights that come with living away from home—where the sun or moon usually cannot reach. The phone wakes aglow and chirps of people complaining about their inability to take a sandwiched leave. Some colleagues of mine are only one weekend away from their homes. What mildly inconvenient commuting is to them, a whole geography of longing is to me. But I try not to turn it into a ‘who-misses-home-the-most’ contest. If traced on paper, life is a culmination of two axes: time and money. Add a third and, maybe, call it energy. Despite the crests and troughs, the line always resolves into the same answer: I’m not coming home this time. Once, I was a little bird slowly blooming out of the warm embrace of the nest to learn the taste of first flight, believing that distance was proof of growth. Now I’m just plainly tired of being the burnt-out lamp on my parents’ windowsill—my absence pressed into the fabric of home harder than my presence ever did. Outside, the city bursts in colors that don’t belong to me. The varied hues of promises that strings of cheap bulbs hung across foreign railings do not bring in. The sky’s flush borrowed from the tinge of motichoor laddoos made by a mother I don’t recognise. The echoes of a playful bickering that is similar but not the same. Inside, the fairy lights hum—a soft, artificial dawn. I tell myself it’s enough, that light is light, no matter where it comes from. But it’s not. It never is.
***
Abhilipsa Sahoo is one of the 100 commended poets for Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award 2019, and a Best of The Net nominee. Her works have appeared or are forthcoming in Perverse, JAKE, Bending Genres, Redivider, and elsewhere. She’s a software engineer based in Bengaluru, India. You can find her on X: @_abelisaurus_ and Instagram: @_abelisaurus_.
