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. 

At Sridhar Srigudda the rain comes once again electricity dies away while lightning flares tomorrow’s my birthday listening to night’s rain moutainside serenity dissolves time’s cares I’ll be 53 my life’s plan not yet plain I await a Calcutta job my love affairs are merely notes now Bhairavi’s sweet pain my trusty sarangi again prepares

At any rate, I’m soon off to Walmart for necessities. I’m running low on shampoo and body wash. If my intuition is correct

Sujit Prasad curates twelve poems in translation, for 12 months of the year 2023.

The prescience itself is attacked: the caterpillars’ own being hates that it knows it will change, won’t let the secret be. Life can’t all be eating.

We are entitled, much the same as the perception of time dying To look away in the direction where we notice a crow flying Because the crow, whether you know it or not, is a song bird

My daughter backs into the neighbor's car– confesses over a coffee table of water stains and smoke thick like a 90s beer pub. She gets off easy. She doesn’t know what she doesn’t know.

An asylum in a mad city, Bedlam begins in a town ditch with eleven chain, six locks, four manacles, and two stocks, to guard (or guard against) the menti capti, whose minds lay tangled in a landscaped brain. Mary’s blue robe the only sky for inmates;

creatures caught in the heat of mating/ body parts of personal history/ memory’s tenuous grip/ sudden dip

How it just happens that we all have someone to make a blue tarpaulin memory with. Even if you find them many years later and many miles away, There is a spot on this Bombay Chowpatty Where the sea is so close to you.

But I like my own bed best, she says, and the quiet in mornings, when I scatter seed for the birds, the quiet in evenings, not at all. That's when you should call.

Do they make the cut, or are they too inconvenient? What about rain? and never will, dismembering or in many different lights, Something huge and without music has just happened.

Jars of stunted-self languish there still, in the half light. Stacked fat slices of summer pear. Peeled, cleft and without mouths, they kiss up against the glass.

And my father angry at traffic, always. Still they are driving on the screen past midnight. Sometimes we would arrive in the dark, my grandmother in the kitchen waiting.

Death is eternal truth, but death is also resurrection.  Death is as old as the sea and as new as the monsoon that births new life.