Drawing Room : Homely poems 1. Everyday father would return from office, sit down on the sofa, untie his laces and take off his socks. He’d casually drop them in his shoes, and let the feet slide into his massage
Fall and Autumn Here, the leaves turn yellow first. Not the bright yellow that blinds the eyes, like sunlight, But paler, like life draining slowly from the hollow cheeks of an old man. Then the leaves fall Sometimes they
Stone This hunger is no ‘humour’. My bread is freedom. This ought to be a sin; I am a traitor, Deprived of all belongings. The stones which I throw Once used to be my home. And the day I
In the night of your cocoon There is a thread, Which ties me to you. Invisible, woven flecks of stardust; A twinned twine of intangibility and fear. Ancient yet alive. In the night of your cocoon, Filled with glowing,
Hip-Bone Butterfly I want to wake you up in the morning and peel you off bit by bit till you’re parched and white. I would like to see you whole, unblinking, watch you unravel like a sanctum —
The Evening Is an Interlude The evening is but a pause, A cold sigh Or a new paragraph. All days and nights pause here Time turns over and continues the narrative. The evening is but a pause. The
‘Pound’s Mr. Gandhi’ No one liked him especially, I think Since all saints are great destroyers Imagine the poor, with a painted paradise at the end of it without a painted paradise at the end of it Once there
All that unfinished business of love… Like a cardigan, half sewn Ending in scraggy tendrils of wool Like a spider’s web, half woven Ending in broken, hanging gossamer threads Like an uprooted plant Ending in muddy rootlets
I CHING Not five thousand years ago But yesterday In a flight of freedom from the silky sheaves of affluent slumber folded in A coffee table book in a Hong Kong household Our great ancestor Grandfather
Firewife When you did not come back for me, I bit off my braid and walked my heaviness to the river and cursed the many ways I had sought to hold you, how I had stood bloodless under