USHA RAMAN - POEMS

Usha Raman is a writer and media studies scholar based in Hyderabad, India. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry has appeared in a variety of publications,and she has one collection of poetry, published by the Writers Workshop, Kolkata, India, titled "All the Spaces in Between" (2009). Her work across these genres explores the politics--and curiosities--of the everyday,

---

Cinema verité
​

​Drenched in the clouded morning
sunrise
shadows curve into
the sink
their escaping limbs
caught in the
not-quite-well-scrubbed
wire mesh cups;
Tap open
trickles in, a reminder
of water shortages to come
along with the summer heat;
reminding one of climate change
and other distant
truths, yet-to-come-true.
Morning chores
undo the afternoons,
steal away lifetimes
bracketing dreams
into the brief spaces
between snoozing alarm bells.
Getting up, getting ready
you pocket your might-have-beens
and turn the kurta inside out
to its seamless
practical side
and simply, quietly
wear it to work
after one last swipe
of a wet cloth
over the counter top.
 
 

Missing
​

​Lost in the cusp
between your language
and mine, dear mother,
lie the lost thoughts
of a generation.
Lacking words for feelings, ideas, experiences
that burrow into vestigial nameless spaces,
they turn into things sensed
only vaguely
like the discomfort of
a dull headache.
I wonder as I watch
them disappear,
and search for the absent words
and phrases that have failed to follow me
into this mono-lingual modernity;
where they go,
these things that lose function
like organs diminished
by evolution.
And then my self flounders, briefly,
in a once-charted space
until my world re-orients itself
around a smaller, known vocabulary.
 

Everyday
​

​We spend our lives
resisting ordinariness
fashioning our parts
in incidental conversations
much lke
commissioned portraitists
--a burnish here,
a polite brushstroke there,
soft-focus backdrops
and interestingly placed
sidelong glances
carelessly thrown-in references
within a frame
carefully chosen--
set our lives apart
from the rest.
 
…
 
You run into an old
friend/neighbor/acquaintance/colleague
from a time when you shared
a childhood/street/commute/office lounge
and attempt
to rediscover interests.
You shake out woolly memories
beat out the dust of forgetting
and hold them up between you
marveling at their specialness.
For a time, then
you rescue each other
from the oblivion
that is an airplane,
anonymous, blue, ordinary,
disappearing into the clouds.

 

Saraswathi
​

​Folded into the sibilant consonants
Of my given name
Lie hidden my mother’s dreams.
Playing pandi in he skin-darkening sun,
Racing the wind, leg thrown over the bars of a borrowed bicycle,
Riding the bus to college
Shoulders jostling against each other
And bookbags heavy with the weight
Of an uncertain knowledge;
Their words cutting rough roads
Into territories held back
By forbidden maps.
 
My grandmother calls out to me,
Invoking the goddess
Who sits still, impassive,
Her white swan’s neck
Weighed down by the ornaments
Of expectation.
 
My father pronounces my name.
It escapes gingerly from his lips
To occupy an unfamiliar bubble
Outside the space of a sloka
As he draws my future, algorithmically.
 
And I learn slowly, painfully,
To resist
Dreams, expectations, promises, predictions
And even prayers.

Transparent
​

​I read your face
its tics and twitches
the incipient smiles and frowns
the glazing of the eyes
that nictitating move engineered by a watchful mind
and the Maxfactor impassiveness;
 
while
 
you read mine.
 
And I read in my mind
your reading of mine.
 
Glass fronts
cellophane wrappers
those invisible cloaks
we allow to fall
between us
obscuring, enhancing, tinting, tainting
the meaning-making machinery
of words and their auras.
 
It’s how things begin
and travel through
files and folders
speeches and seminars
from people to parliament
and brick by brick
grow into
walls of un-meaning.
 
And then the task
of breaking it down
first with windows to look into
then doors to walk through
archaeologists of the everyday
reconstruct
from the debris of expression
meaning
reverse engineered.