Sudeep Sen’s Water Poems

Lotus Pool, photo Sudeep Sen

.Flower floating on water, photo Sudeep Sen

NIGHT WATER

Galactic plasma, cosmos’s green blood —

      night liquid lit by a light mimicking a distant sun.

Pre-natal amniotic fluid, embryo swimming

      in a womb, pre-birth — before emerging whole.

Crickets count our heartbeats, as a lone-bird tweets

      a mother’s call. You walk on water, chest high,

your garment soaked and translucent. You pirouette

      subaqueous, limbs half-swimming, fingers fluttering

like a wingless moth seeking glare’s heat in this cool,

      hands circling a patterned dance-form — your eyes

peering into darkness excavating the gathering stars,

      their optics hidden to human eyesight’s secrets.

This may sound like silence — a Sapphic fragment,

      a delicate phrase of an alaap or overture packing

multiple melodic strains in one sequence, a half-pause.

      As pure sonics of the rumbling Milky Way reveals

itself for a millisecond — you offer your obeisance

      on the water’s edge, as its surface-tension melts

and eases for a moment, allowing for the intricate

      abhinaya’s gliding arc to close her parenthesis in.

🙡

ROCK IS WATER, WATER ROCK

Rock is water, water rock.

       Stones sing, liquid-splashed.

After heavy rains, granite

       glistens and gleams anew.

Steam stews, slow-simmers

       on its brutal sun-scorched

skin — lines, cracks, fissures

       marking millennia’s passing.

Congregation of oval granite —

       gigantic, spectacular, stoic,

unmoved — balanced elegantly

       on impossible fulcrums.

Nature-art’s imperceptible

       movements — measured

in tectonic micro-shifts. Like

       blood, aquifers crave life.

Deep embedded cratons —

       slow-carving new gravity.

Rock is water, water rock.

       Stones sing, liquid-splashed.

After heavy rains, granite

       glistens and gleams anew.

Steam stews, slow-simmers

       on its brutal sun-scorched

skin — lines, cracks, fissures

       marking millennia’s passing.

Congregation of oval granite —

       gigantic, spectacular, stoic,

unmoved — balanced elegantly

       on impossible fulcrums.

Nature-art’s imperceptible

       movements — measured

in tectonic micro-shifts. Like

       blood, aquifers crave life.

Deep embedded cratons —

       slow-carving new gravity.

🙡

EROSION

The drops of rain make a hole in the stone,

not by violence, but by oft falling.

— Lucretius

Repetition is an act of great diligence —

      the reason stones are shaped the way are

by wind and water. Erosion’s relentless

      brush creating rounded, opaque parabolas —

boulders balanced impossibly on pin-points.

      Even gravity succumbs — to art-making.

---

ERASURE

Paisleys, florets and oviforms —

      form filigreed lace-like lines

carved by rushes of rain-water.

     Multiple micro-waterways

draw out branch-like tracks

      on red rock-speckled earth.

The streams meet, run parallel,

      seep deep into earth-layers

feeding subterranean wells.

      Over centuries water-patterns

create striations, dips, curvatures.

      Wind-water’s erosive power

etch, mineral-mapping granite’s

      stone art — erasure’s enigma.

🙡

RELENTLESS RAIN BEATS DOWN THROUGH THE NIGHT AND DAY

Relentless rain beats down through the night and day —

it is unceasing — balletic in its falling. Silver striations

of wet-streams cast impressionistic paintings

on glass window-panes. Endless thunder-showers —

a choral refrain. Rain’s fullness — a fecund presence.

🙡

IMPRINT

   haiku

water’s imprint on

      stone, residual — its birth

marks time, age, sex, place.

🙡

LAKE HAIKU 1

water’s mirrored sheen —

      swan’s skate, gliding on its skin —

marine undertow

🙡

LAKE HAIKU 2

clouds lie on water

      photo-perfect and stone still —

a transient frame

---

RED RAIN

Chopped wood —

      stacked, floating dead

An idle boat —

      rudderless, adrift

Black rain,

      red rain —

but not a drop

      to drink or taste.

No space left

      for humans —

only beauty

      of contamination

like rainbows

      and sunsets —

prolongs illusion

      It is illusion

that allows us

      to live, dream —

charting out our own

      perpetual diary.

🙡

i. e. [THAT IS]

i.e.

        because you hear –

the sound

of a lone rustling leaf –

you hear the sea

i.e.

        because I consider

the sea silent –

you hear its silence

in my studio.

i.e.

        & because of that –

the silence will not empty

the sea,

of its leaves.

🙡

RISING SEA LEVELS

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea.

 — Wallace Stevens

Granite outcrop

      that once jutted out

of the ebullient sea —

fifty metres

      from the shore —

is seen no more.

The lighthouse — 

   our beacon, 

an adventure island.

We’d swim to its base —

      shells, mussels, 

striated oval stones,

seagull eggs nested

      on slippery 

kelp-laced rocks. 

As children, reality —

      as adults,

a submerged memory.

🙡

DROUGHT, CLOUD

It is bone-dry — I pray for any moisture

      that might fall from the emaciated skies —

There is a cloud, just a solitary cloud

      wafting perilously —

But it is too far in the distance

      for any real hope — for rain.

first si

Sudeep Sen is a leading international poet whose prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Penguin), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury), Anthropocene (Pippa Rann, Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize), and Red. Edited landmark anthologies include: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), and Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Pippa Rann). Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize), Rock, and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. His photography represented by ArtMbassy, Rome/Berlin. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.” Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival.