Vol 1 No 1 2007
Raw Silk
l.
Open the door or I’ll faint hearing amma’s voice –
Where is the silk from your grandmother’s sari?
Raw silk
brought all the way from Varanasi.
In another life I crouched on the stone floor reading poetry
– Le ciel est, par-dessus le toit...
cette paisible rumeur-la that sort of thing
and the town was literally blazing –
guns, grenades, blisters of smoke
on market place and mosque.
Through the bars of a white washed school room
Verlaine peering, above his head a palm tree cradling the sun.
Far from Kerala amma fed me tales --
After her wedding, years after the Salt March
grandmother coaxed mulberries
from monsoon soil, clouds ran riot
silkworms coiled under the skin of leaves
berries dripped free
the courtyard was a sea of blood.
When grandmother died
the wedding sari with its brocade
saved from the bonfire Gandhi had ordained.
was wrapped in muslin
set in a wardrobe, the door locked tight.
ll.
Child, its bad enough to be in a desert land
why mutter poems in a language I can’t understand?
How could I say that in the sandstorm
I heard Verlaine singing,
Rimbaud setting fire to a felucca,
by the Mahdi’s palace
syllables run amuk,
Gordon’s head nodding on a stake
as red dates clustered
on the bough of immortality,
hence poems I committed to memory
flute music guiding me through the vertigo of history.
I wept in sorrow I could scarcely bear
for a mother killed on the street
a girl child pinned to a bed
as ancient hands cut at her.
and smoke rose from an island in the Nile
where bricks were baked for insurrection.
Should I cast it all away
be the girl who can’t remember?
Could I have uttered what I didn’t know --
when silk comes out of the silkworm’s hole
it is the color of colostrum.
It was Khartoum and it was not.
O inwardness its own reward
as the sun rises on the city of God.
lll.
Amma there are silkworms
dancing in the firmament
above your head and mine
and the mother of worms
doffs her veil
and darkens her lips
and sets a crown
of mulberry leaves on my head.
When I open the drawer
to search for silk
I touch smoke,
raw silk turned to smoke in the night’s throat.
Meena Alexander