A girl perched on a Translucent ocean In a dusty rose tunic On rowboat the color Of old paper, like the sky, The foam on the water,

Hovering over my body, in a tangled   mess of silver threads going snap, snap,   snap, I realise you were the fibre and tendon,   and glue that held while we ended   and began and ended and began;

but the berries do not know they grow because they grow and only know how to grow in the front circle in the backyard up and down the gravel road all along the fence line

Yet there the seed waits all the while and dreams of its own life — my only way of reaching it is with my paring knife.

I stood over him as he sat at the table setting the book down automatically in front of him he looked up and almost made eye contact asking, “Who do I make it out to?”

From one realm to the next, may Your essence forever sizzle and soar. Because whether You believed or not, despite the world not consistently admitting nor deserving it, You were always the hero we needed.

I am red like raag yaman. Red like stirring ardor, like relentless vikara, Like flesh awash with rasa, Wasteful, like Laal Ishq, Red like death.

because there will come a mile  where he is too weak to brush a horsefly  from the bridge of his nose, his head on a stretcher pillow  ringed by news microphones, surrounded  by the indifference of trees;

Winking bulbs, screaming vents. You need specialized footwear here. You need to wash workwear in a separate load due to its villainous grease.Senior members will ruthlessly remind. You must learn how to resorb the body’s complaints, fashion stout leather insides out of soft tissue.

When he scolded us, in our classroom with Sister Martin standing in back, about dating a non-catholic, his voice rose. “Drop them like a hot potato.”

This darkness is a blessing, these minor keys in your mouth a different kind of Pentecost—deep cuts cutting me loose from language.

There—stuck in my neural net the drama has no answers for how turritopsis dohrnii can live forever, or why

A stop in Chinatown netted me a wild horse: purple plastic, glowing radioactive in the dark twenty years later, a survivor of that trip and more.

Dr. Abhijit Khandkar, a dalit poet and doctor by profession curates the works of seven contemporary dalit poets, who speak about various issues that concern their lives and as a result reflect in their writings. To be able to recognise, participate and understand such poetry is going back to the very roots of our culture, our angst and all that encompasses our literature. 

CP Surendran is one of India's finest poets- a strange stillness follows his works, a numb silence too. Here he shares with us a stellar piece. Accompanying it, the poet's musings.