Bhatt Sujata - Collected Poems

The young widow thinks she should have burned on her husbands funeral pyre.

She could not, for her mother-in-law insisted she raise the only son of her only son. The young widow sits outside in the garden overlooking a large pond. Out of the way, still untouchable, she suckles her three-week-old son and thinks she could live for those hungry lips; live to let him grow bigger than herself. Her dreams lie lazily swishing their tails in her mind like buffaloes dozing, some with only nostrils showing in a muddy pond. Tails switch to keep fat flies away, and horns, as long as a mans hand, or longer keep the boys, and their pranks away. It is to the old farmers tallest son they give their warm yellowish milk.

He alone approaches: dark-skinned and naked except for a white turban, a white loincloth. He joins them in the pond, greets each one with love: my beauty, my pet slaps water on their broad flanks splashes more water on their dusty backs. Ears get scratched, necks rubbed, drowsy faces are splashed awake. Now he prods them out of the mud out of the water, begging loudly Come my beauty, come my pet, let us go! And the pond shrinks back as the wide black buffaloes rise. The young widow walks from tree to tree, newly opened leaves brush damp sweet smells across her face. The infants mouth sleeps against her breast.

Dreams stuck inside her chest twitch as she watches the buffaloes pass too close to her house, up the steep road to the dairy. The loud loving voice of the farmers son holds them steady without the bite of any stick or whip.

Only paper and wood are safe from a menstruating womans touch. So they built this room for us, next to the cowshed. Here, were permitted to write letters, to read, and it gives a chance for our kitchen-scarred fingers to heal. Tonight, I cant leave the stars alone.

And when I cant sleep, I pace in this small room, I pace from my narrow rope-bed to the bookshelf filled with dusty newspapers held down with glossy brown cowries and a conch. When I cant sleep, I hold the conch shell to my ear just to hear my blood rushing, a song throbbing, a slow drumming within my head, my hips. This aching is my blood flowing against, rushing against something knotted clumps of my blood, so I remember fistfuls of torn seaweed rising with the foam, rising. Then falling, falling up on the sand strewn over newly laid turtle eggs.

The way I learned to eat sugar cane in Sanosra: I use my teeth to tear the outer hard chaal then, bite off strips of the white fibrous heart suck hard with my teeth, press down and the juice spills out. January mornings the farmer cuts tender green sugar cane and brings it to our door. Afternoons, when the elders are asleep we sneak outside carrying the long smooth stalks. The sun warms us, the dogs yawn, our teeth grow strong our jaws are numb; for hours we suck out the russ, the juice sticky all over our hands.

So tonight when you tell me to use my teeth, to suck hard, harder, then, I smell sugar cane grass in your hair and imagine youd like to be shrdi shrdi out in the fields the stalks sway opening a path before us