► Vatsala's Origami micro-chapbooks & selected poems are available below. We are grateful to the author for permission to share her work with us.
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Origami Micro-chapbook |
Selected Poem(s) |
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Cover art by K. Anany
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All poems are from the collection
"Suyam" Chennai: Sneha, 2000.
Wherever translations have appeared in print,
details are given.
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{mooblock=Rope (Kayaru)}
I detest ropes.
All of them—
the village well’s and Chitappa’s coir that ties his cases.
The chain around
my wife’s neck is of a different kind. Chitti’s too— she is scared of me. So is Appa, who wonders about Amma’s last words.
All she said was:
‘A chitti will arrive. Be a good boy and grow up soon. Sorry, kanna, I have to go.’ I nodded, kicking my ball. She kicked the chair, shaking my baby sister in the womb, tightening the rope round her neck.
I detest ropes.
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Vatsala © 2012
{/mooblock}
Translated by K. Srilata and Subashree Krishnaswamy
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Cover art by K. Anany
•
All poems are from the collection
"Suyam" Chennai: Sneha, 2000.
Wherever translations have appeared in print,
details are given.
Translations in this micro-chapbook
by K. Srilata and Subashree Krishnaswamy
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{mooblock=Why Didn't I Become A Poet}
(Naan yen kavignar aga villai?)
It’s only after you asked me
that I wondered: why I never became a poet.
Digging deep,
I found no evidence that I wasn’t one. I’d like to ask you something: do dead poems count? Since they dissolved while still unborn, I couldn’t give them shape. I wasn’t aware of their inception, so I never recorded their time of birth.
But, with some, their time of death
is clear to me now.
One died when my grandmother praised
the neat way I folded the clothes. A couple when I picked up the ladle, sorry for my mother, who struggled with my brothers’ voracious greed and my father’s fastidious tongue. A few passed away when I befriended a typewriter to save up for a gold chain, just so a yellow thread could be tied round my neck.
Bored, are you?
I will keep it short then. A hundred vanished as I washed my babies’ bottoms, tutored my darling children, saved up for my son’s overseas education, stood by my husband as he washed the feet of the son-in-law from America. If they all come to life and take shape, a poet, I will be.
If not, next month,
after his death anniversary, when my green card darlings go back home, after my numb feelings are massaged and I journey a bit into my eyes and release my breath completely, who knows, I might become a brand new poet. •
Vatsala © 2012
{/mooblock} |