The Profane: Poems

By Satyajit Sarna

'The Profane is a note from the underground, a message being sent from an island on fire, an email shot off at three in the morning. This is to say that Sarna's book is one of vulnerability, loneliness, joy, humour, hope and grief. It's a human book which tells us it's okay to be human.' - Matthew Dickman 'Sarna has something rich and meaningful to communicate, and the lyric sensibility, love of language, beat and rhyme, and inventive zest to bring alive on the page all the vividness and pleasure and plangency of life. This is a book to savour and treasure for all the years it will stand on your shelf.' - Chandrahas ChoudhuryA witches' brew of art, politics, religion and mythology, The Profane is rich with music and images. Here are poems of heartbreak and disillusion, of loneliness and mortality, but also of passion for life on earth, in all its mud and glory. In the pages of this collection, Kurt Cobain, Napoleon and Amir Khusro meet, and Homeric tough guys get what they deserve. Satyajit Sarna's vision embraces our broken world and salutes the one chance we get to experience it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins India
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9789353023287

Satyajit Sarna

Satyajit Sarna lives in New Delhi. He is the author of the novel The Angel's Share (HarperCollins India, 2012). This is his first collection of poetry.

Book preview

Earthnight

I’ve read this – that plants emit light.

When you focus the mechanical sight,

light seeps from the heart of the flower

and stains across your cornea.

Think of Earthnight before man:

that sovereign plant planet,

glowing in the dark, light

rippling with the wind,

tall grasses, sharp ears,

fronds with teeth, curling ferns,

hot beast stink, the turn of loam,

in the wet squall, claw, tooth, scale,

a place with no names,

the world before fields.

I know my place – slumbering, placental

in the stalks, nose twitching for nut and seed,

an ancestor dreams, three inches long

of a cooler world, with the lights off.

An Apology

I wish it hadn’t been so dark

and I had drunk less, not smoked

that joint, not shown up at two,

jacket unbuttoned, knowing what

bodies were good for, that I had been

wise enough to see further

than that winter night.

If only I had stayed till nine,

made breakfast, met the dog.

But I was good for nothing then.

I walked home in the wolf dawn,

and the tapeworm of my habits

stole your words from me.

All I recall is exasperation, darkness,

rump and round, the smell of rubber,

and you saying, what a pity,

this could have been something,

a pity, you could have been something.

Shirts

For PFM

Her first boyfriend asked her to iron his shirts

and she did it, guileless – she didn’t know

that you don’t do these things, that love hurts

and people can ride your kindness.

She gave him the shirts and said, kind and slow,

that maybe they really shouldn’t be together.

But she ironed the damn shirts. We were incredulous.

Then, that one day at the river, the water was green and moss

lined the edges, orange fish swam in the hazy current with us.

She was floating on her back. I told her of my shock and loss,

in rainy England – my uncle who was kind and guileless

and his heart had given in – on the carpet, his children right there.

She floated in a spiral, hair a halo, and said, god bless

all the living and the dying, and that every Parsi was raised in the fear

of extinction. We drank our beer, sitting on the rocks, warm Cauvery

slipping through the basin and the gorge, trees overhanging,

the sun blowing light, beer making our limbs weary,

heads sleepy. Death was on our lips, but nothing could bring

him into the house of our youth, and in the water

the fish were alive, and when we broke the shining

silk of it, the dream washed over each shoulder.

Many years later, the police called it suicide:

she walked out into the fields in the Midlands winter

and lay down. Cold earth, big slate sky.

I don’t doubt it – Death lived with her, caressed her hair,

held her for some time before they found her lying cold.

For her brother and her boyfriend, a muting blow –

they both stopped speaking. I was driving when the news came

and I could believe it. We had swum in the basin in the shadow

of it. I had said that day that there was no shame –

to die young was noble, was preferred. But that was bravado.

I think of her often.

This evening I was running; the rain was slanting.

The light was blank. With no one watching,

I lay down. The earth was