Malayalam’s Ghazal

Listen! Someone’s saying a prayer in Malayalam.
He says there’s no word for ‘despair’ in Malayalam.

Sometimes at daybreak you sing a Gujarati garba.
At night you open your hair in Malayalam.

To understand symmetry, understand Kerala.
The longest palindrome is there, in Malayalam.

When you’ve been too long in the rooms of English,
Open your windows to the fresh air of Malayalam.

Visitors are welcome in The School of Lost Tongues.
Someone’s endowed a high chair in Malayalam.

I greet you my ancestors, O scholars and linguists.
My father who recites Baudelaire in Malayalam.

Jeet, such drama with the scraps you know.
Write a couplet, if you dare, in Malayalam.

The New Island

Once, carried by the rains of September,
a boat lifted free of its mooring place,
of a shed become part of the river,
    and floated past
    the porch, where I caught her.

Somehow the house kept itself clear of the
river that had made it a new island,
but everything around us was water.
    I made the stern
    seesaw with every step.

You were lining up the prow with a tree
I thought too far upstream in the blurred tides
of current to be trusted. Now I’m sorry
    I held the sides
    as we climbed the water.

Your hands, as you moved us forward, were sure
in their shaping of water, your eye true,
and our few feet of hammered wood, our floor,
    took us in to
    lamplight, voices, the shore.