Devki Panchmatia: Two Poems
A Soft Cry From Everywhere
a
The rain stops like a sound
that dies in your throat.
/
We ask certain people to make
a daily journey to the wells.
At night, there are stories. As he listens,
my son drags a hangnail of skin
down his thumb that is the shape and size of a day.
/
A dry riverbed is an accusation.
I blame the dry riverbed. My laughing wife
lies on her back and solves each fracture
in her memory.
/
My wife dies quietly.
Someone finds a spring in the forest that runs for a week.
/
We dig the riverbed. I am digging like
an animal blundering in the dark.
One man is convinced
that the ground he digs is wet. I watch
him gathering firm handfuls of root-split clumps:
It’s like butter in my hands, he says smiling.
It’s like money.
/
A day is a father and a son who
write in a stretch of wet clay with a stick.
A night is a story of slim fish
in pools that no one believes.
/
A mother and her child leave town. They reach safely and forget us.
/
My son writes:
Our thirst will outlive us. Let us carve
water.
a
Cassiopeia
a
The sign for ‘night’ is a black rectangle
block-printed onto silk by a woman in a village
who can’t read
When we lay on our backs in the dead grass I told you
a lie yes
I told you by night and we all know lies gain
a certain momentum
a certain glint
at that hour
I smoothed my dress on the edge of that night
and I ran off into the years
I told you that Cassiopeia was a shroud-weaver
with two daughters that killed her
If we were all sailors and this was ancient times my
lie might have had some impact
Might have smudged a dark line on the graph that
keeps track of our sanity
But it makes no difference now
The woman just goes home
to her children who both make the sign
with their hands. Night, night,
night.
Devki Panchmatia is a poet and essayist from London. Her work has appeared in Cordite Poetry Review, Gutter, and Channel.
