Covenant of Compost: A Cycle of Ten Poems by Paromita Patranobish
Poetry: ‘A comet catches fire, she knows / It is her plexus exhaling / The ghost of trauma, / This is the closest she will / Come to maternity’
I. Moth Wing
The first memory is
A slab of sunlight,
A soft, quivering shape
Of pale yellow on granite,
Like the table butter that her
Mother lays out at
breakfast on a tray—
Yet unlike—not grease
But moth wing
Light, insubstantial,
Translucent without residue.
From that dancing tangerine
slice of afternoon sun
First spectral friend
She learns contradiction,
Metaphor, all that eludes,
The fascination of flight.
II. Pentecost
In school they ask
For a drawing and
She rubs the brightest
Yellow crayon in her box
Against rough construction paper,
As if kindling a fire—
Sunflower petals rise like
flaming tongues,
From the depths of
A brown centre, stoic, large
Mystical and she slips into
Its cavernous cold
A pentecostal reverie
Till the teacher roars
In condescension, and laughter,
From fifty mouths are tongues
Of fire burning her face.
III. Maternity
She steps into their
Padded insoles, laces
Firm like straps of an
Armour none can snatch,
They are decks
In which her feet turn
Like rowboat oars
Locked in unbroken rhythm.
She is Cinderella and the
Carriage too. She steers herself
On her throbbing tendons to
The romance of long-distance running—
The track is forgetfulness
On it her imagination gives up
The lie and becomes muscular,
A comet catches fire, she knows
It is her plexus exhaling
The ghost of trauma,
This is the closest she will
Come to maternity
Birthing herself free,
Inhibitions incinerate as her
Ponytail cuts the wind
Like a whiplash of selfhood.
IV. Germination
In the winter of solitude
Trust is the color of a rosebud,
She views it from the
Corner of her eye as
She sits drumming her pencil
On the desk to drown
The sound of her heart.
Her wish is a severance from
This heart, its jagged broken
Lines she cannot mend—
She sees a vein of
Fuchsia climb the curl
Of her unopened rose
Creamy white with an arterial
Hint of pink mouthing
the word she is afraid to say
Life, tremor of a voice
Yet clear as the stripe
Of her favorite shade calibrating
A lone bud like a heartbeat.
At dawn a pair of
Mynas shriek her awake
Scurrying on the ledge of
Her balcony they watch
With intent circumspection as
She pours water into
a bowl, breaks apples into
squares, they contemplate her
Slip into meditative stupor,
They stay, she straightens to
Gaze at the sky after
An eternity, in the softening
Of her eyes the sky
Yields and her heart.
V. Fossil
There are knots where
Words flow, in her
Stomach and her lungs,
The passageways of emotion
Have debris from never
Being held or soothed—
She wonders how her
Blood moves at all how
Any part of her converses
With another having never
Known the thaw of tenderness.
Her throat holds a crevasse
Cracked from the heat
Of stifled tears, her chest
Is a moraine of harsh
Recrimination or vague indifference,
Nonchalant nod, stray glance
The ballast of criticism weighs
Her stomach till she feels
glacial, geological, archaic,
A fossil made of
infinite disapproval
Pressed into her soul.
VI. Compost
The world shuts like
A giant clam.
Suddenly contagion sweeps
The streets, an invisible
Charon with his
Boat overflowing,
In the twilight hour of
Closed doors and
Contactless existence she
Cracks open the soil
In her backyard—
Mimosas and forget-me-nots
Cosmos and calendula
Bulbs of ginger lily
A sprig of hibiscus, potted
geraniums, she lines them like
A kindergarten class,
Her knees dig deep—
With plastered gloves she
Caresses them, pods,
Pale green leaves, larval roots
Like creased newborn skin
Limpid veins that almost
dissolve in hers, buds
She holds up to her cheek
As if to teach them the safety
She never knew, as if
To give them the permission
Denied to her stilted self
To one day inevitably
Surpass her, for all she did
Was stunt her growth
She holds them to the sun
To teach them the alphabet
Of freedom.
All through the year
As breath becomes rarefied
And streets turn into deserts,
She builds her backyard like
A covenant of compost,
A sodden ark in which she
mends the rifts in her mantle.
VII. Gastropod
In the new city
It rains more than she
Has seen water,
She watches it rush in
the evening as drops
pelt asbestos like percussion.
Through streets carrying
trash and the
day’s tepid light
into a moist gloaming.
A colony of earthworms erupt,
A volcano of entwined motion
She watches them wend their way
Through the damp—
She rests her chaos in the
Mathematics of their
measured inscrutability,
At night a snail lodges
On her wall, fresh paint
Marked by a signature of slime,
She lays under a blanket
observing its unmoving movement
Like parsing the pauses
Between seconds,
They are two inscriptions
in a syntax of stillness,
Caught in a quantum entanglement
of progress that is stall—
She is teaching herself to
surrender to the halts
that now punctuate her body.
VIII. Fabric
In a quiet hour she kneels
At a chestnut pew,
Crusty elbows rest on wood
Her skin traces the invisible
Lines of other hands
Folded in prayer,
A communion of epidermis—
History is tactile,
A palm drawn with indentations
Of collective dreaming,
An atlas of persistence,
A terrain deepened by practice.
Behind her closed lids
A picture flickers, a
Vision or imagination
Then dissipates into
The incensed dark
And fragrance of lilies—
She thinks of her who
Built this place as a sanctuary
or a temple
Replacing power with love
Femininizing the equation
of progress with nurture,
She passes the block in a corner
That bears her name
Aroma of fresh coffee and
Bales of fabric, where girls
Behind sewing machines
At drawing boards
Corral designs and blueprints.
They say she was a poet
She read her turns of
Phrase in yellowed pages,
Precise, poised, elegant,
Authority that doesn’t blanket
Or smother but like
A seamstress gathers pleats
Into radical synthesis.
IX. Submergence
The light shifts at
Four thirty nestling into
A cloud edge
She packs her belongings—
By the granite ledge
Between pink asters
She waits for the fish to surface,
Its body is cavorting
Carmine, proud whiskers,
It ripples like a quark
Sun bouncing off
Acrobatic scales
Koi, they say remember faces
Memory is a currency
They transact in
As if to entertain her
Before the day closes
The fish leaps, tail sprays
flecks of gold
and vanishes in a dive
Tradition is not heavy
But a liquid ancestry
That breathes.
X. Grafting
She has grown
not in the way one measures
on doorframes or timelines,
but in the slow spiral
of root toward soil,
in the patient unwinding
of what it means
to stay.
She internalizes
The dynamics of finitude,
The cadence of unlearning—
How planting oneself
is not a gesture,
but Grace.
Humility that hums
beneath the surface
like root-talk
in a shared forest.
She listens to the choreography
of canopy and undergrowth,
The generosity of
Moss and mycelium,
The patient syntax
of pollinators
redrawing the shape of everything.
At night under the shower
She hears the breath of the world
in her own.
The wounds are graft points,
Even the endings
contain green.
***
Paromita Patranobish teaches at Mount Carmel College, Bangalore. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33
