Poems of Kamala Das (My Favourites-2)

This collection (and also the previous one) aims to provide the accessibility to poems of Kamala Das to the readers, scholars and others who are interested in the same.

The Suicide

Bereft of soul

My body shall be bare.

Bereft of body

My soul shall be bare.

Which would you rather have

O kind sea?

Which is the more dead

Of the two?

I throw the bodies out,

I cannot stand their smell.

Only the souls may enter

The vortex of sea.

Only the souls know how to sing

At the vortex of the sea.

Your body shall be dead,

Poor thing,

Dead as driftwood, drifting

And drifting to the shore.

Your body shall ride the tide,

Rider, slumped dead

On white war-house.

Charging.

Your body shall bruise white

Against the coral reefs,

Your body,

Your lonely body.

I tell you, sea,

I have enough courage to die,

But not enough.

Not enough to disobey him

Who said: Do not die

And hurt me that certain way.

How easy your duties are.

How simple.

Only roar a hungry roar,

Leao forward,

And retreat.

You swing and you swing,

O sea, you play a child’s game.

But,

I must pose.

I must pretend,

I must act the role

Of happy woman,

Happy wife.

I must keep the right distance

Between me and the low.

And I must keep the right distance

Between me and the high.

O sea, i am fed up

I want to be simple

I want to be loved

And

If love is not to be had,

I want to be dead, just dead

While I enter deeper,

With joy I discover

The sea’s hostile cold

Is after all skin-deep.

The sea’s inner chambers

Are all very warm.

There must be a sun slumbering

At the vortex of the sea.

O sea, i am happy swimming

Happy, happy, happy ...

The only movement i know well

Is certainly the swim.

It comes naturally to me.

I had a house a Malabar

And a pale-green pond.

I did all my growing there

In the bright summer months.

I swam about and floated,

And divided into the cold and green

I lay speckled green and gold

In all the hours of the sun,

Until

My grandmother cried,

Darling, you must stop this bathing now.

You are much too big to play

Naked in the pond.

Yes, the only movement i really know

Is swimming,

It comes naturally to me.

The white man who offers

To help me forget,

The white man who offers

Himself as a stiff drink,

Is for me,

To tell the truth,

Only water.

Only a pale-green pond

Glimmering in the sun.

In him I swim

All broken with longing.

In his robust blood i float

Drying off my tears.

Yet i never can forget

The only man who hurts.

The only one who seems to know

The only way to hurt.

Holding you is easy

Clutching at moving water,

I tell you, sea,

This is easy,

But to hold him for half a day

Was a difficult task.

It required drinks

To hold him down.

To make him love.

But, when he did not love,

Believe me,

All I could do was to sob like a fool.

O sea,

You generous cow,

You and I are big flops.

We are too sentimental

For our own

Good.

Lights are moving on the shore.

But I shall not return.

Sea, toss my body back

That he knew how to love.

Bereft of body

My soul shall be free.

Take in my naked soul

That he knew how to hurt.

Only the soul knows how to sing

At the vortex of the sea.

The Stone Age

Fond husband, ancient settler in the mind,

Old fat spider, weaving webs of bewilderment,

Be kind. You turn me into a bird of stone, a granite

Dove, you build round me a shabby drawing room,

And stroke my pitted face absent-mindedly while

You read. With loud talk you bruise my pre-morning sleep,

You stick a finger into my dreaming eye. And

Yet, on daydreams, strong men cast their shadows, they sink

Like white suns in the swell of my Dravidian blood,

Secretly flow the drains beneath sacred cities.

When you leave, i drive my blue battered car

Along the bluer sea. I run up the forty

Noisy steps to knock at another’s door.

Through peepholes, the neighbours watch,

They watch me come

And go like rain. Ask me, everybody, ask me

What he sees in me, ask me why he is called a lion,

A libertine, ask me the flavour of his

Mouth, ask me why his hand sways like a hooded snake,

Before it clasps my pubis. Ask me why like

A great tree, felled, he slumps against my breasts,

And sleeps. Ask me why life is short and love is

Shorter still, ask me what is bliss and what its price ...

A Losing Battle

How can my love hold him when the other

Flaunts a gaudy lust and is lioness

To his beast? Men are worthless, to trap them

Use the cheapest bait of all, but never

Love, which in a woman must mean tears

And a silence in the blood.