Two Poems by Satya Dash
False Dawn
If necessary or in love, a jaw transforms
into a hip & vice-versa— a game of mouths feeding
cream-curdled, eye-knuckled, spice-smeared
nerves that are nothing but genes looped over
& over again into new histories of land-shuffled,
water-glued, tree-tongued beds. I’m told, I was born
in anticipation of this mess, the first to arrive alive, my parents well
into the 21st year of a mildewed marriage, ending years
of anger & disenchantment, ending years of long rituals
of consultation with doctors, priests, astrologers. What this meant:
once I grew up, the unhappiness returned— haunting, undiminished
with a resolve that never hacks but stings slow & scythes soft
as a strategy to sustain. In the face of what I cannot control,
must I always flicker like a selfish leaf, laburnum-winged,
asbestos-scented, jaundiced like the brass of a crestfallen trumpet?
A travesty or tragedy— I’m not sure, but unlike in the realm
of arithmetic, double-minused & division-cancelled, my maggot
-kilned body of dusk, born to answer the darkness of dusk
was mistaken for light.
The Prize: A Double Sonnet
eyes burbling eyes buckshot eyes renounced ways
of imagination rife with spice diaphanous with a hint
of trickery like finding out the antlers of an antelope
are actually horns animated in adjacent thirst as mouth pickles
soft clarity of a lake what the head without a body is
capable of jealousy perhaps breathing fire into
wanton clanging of a musked second hiding
behind the blue temple behind a door of ornate filigree
behind a golden lock the key of which the wise king
had given his trusted advisor in anticipation of pleasure
in the hunt for a future treasure but a rival minister cudgeled
by a cheap moment of madness had it made out of debauched
metal that galvanized by the rust of years was unable
to profess any sort of earnest love to the old lock metal whacked
to make metal obdurate handshake grotesque after victory
of resisting observed consummation the door broken
down by an imported machine in a jurassic event eyes rushed
to unearth eyes giddy eyes baroque only to discover a room
having one wall missing only to hear the faint laughter
of familiar eyes from decades back from a celestial terrace
now conducting this orchestra in beautiful breaths
of befuddlement hearts and lungs of eyes becoming
one in the wall of absence subsumed length breadth
and depth of visionary air as if an aquarium’s water
had been finally endowed with the lucid life of flickering fish
the eyes having wined drowsy of lesson weary of spectacle
tiptoe into closets for tight dreaming since they have come
to see there are no walls behind the new wall
About the Author:
Satya Dash is the recipient of the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize for 2020. His poems appear in Waxwing, Wildness, Redivider, Passages North, The Boiler, The Florida Review, Prelude, The Cortland Review and The Journal among others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. He has been nominated previously for Orison Anthology, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. He grew up in Cuttack, Odisha and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at: @satya043
