High Noon and the Body

By Kyla Pasha

Kyla Pasha’s poems sparkle with the rediscovery of song’s electricity while losing none of the sophisticated edge of argument. Pasha’s poems move in several directions, unconstrained by doctrinaire notions of what a poem should do and be. She speaks to present, distant or departed interlocutors; meditates on how we lose and find ourselves again through travel; brings news of war to the front lawn, speaks crisp commonsense to the robed spectres of Death and Memory. The self opens to the world, and the world to the self, in Pasha’s poems, through the realisation that we are formed by the irreducible compound of love, betrayal, forgiveness and anger that swirls constantly in the fragile crucible of the body. In the South Asian context, ‘woman poet’ is all too often a title claimed by simple appeal to physiognomy and asserted through conformity with the dictionary of a feminist cliché. Kyla Pasha is among the exception to this norm, who work to earn their title. She crafts her way through the labyrinth of language, attending sensitivity to the image and cadence, the murmur of several tongues; if her ear is tuned to the intimate tremors of the heart, it also records the epic turbulences both of South Asia and a world in ecological and political meltdown.

• Language: English
• Publisher: YODA PRESS
• Release date: Jan 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9382579370

Book preview

VOHRA

in loving memory of my grandmother

Shahjahan Begum

who brought the poetry in

for Sarah, Ponni, Anno, Mariam

and for my parents, Karen, Pasha and Kathy

Contents

Marauder

Border Poems

High Noon

Marauder

News

News of your desiccation

reached me yesterday, already

in a state of mourning from

burying you twice – once

when you stepped off the edge

into a love of mazes and starry skies

and again, when you dropped

with your anchor down to the bottom,

saw visions and were never

heard from again.

Now you’ve withered.

There is only so much

juice in the cosmos, only so many

pinpoints of light falling.

And after a while, you can’t

suck up the rain. Or dissolve.

News of you

cracking in the chest reached me

today as I spent the morning

painting my face in the mirror.

My eyes I painted to look like

your eyes that you blind

every day. And since you’ve come up

from the deep, I can see under the sea now.

My love, this mending.

I hear you slowly

taking on molecules from the air.

I see you swelling

in infinitesimal portions, mere patches

of deeper colour. The ground

is wet for you. Later,

there will be juice.

And you can draw me, then,

in your image. With eyes.

Radiant skin. With stories

of cities under the sea

and a mouthful of stars.

This mending, my love.

Marauder

There is venom. I can taste it.

There are marauders on the plains