The Litanies of Your Imaginations: Three Poems by Panchami
‘I want to weave lavender flowers into my hair / love my mother, whose anger / is a withering flower / decomposing to memory / in ash burn lavender.’
- Panchami
Tethered to an Anxious God
you recite the litanies of your imaginations
poised in your determination to be unblemished
by your mother’s rage,
blinded in your surrender
that your girlhood is just another
entitlement to your mother’s suffering.
but no one tells you at 6 years old that
your mother has spent her
whole life in a masquerade; all that
beautiful determined litany
just to escape
the reality of your beating heart
& its tiny epiphanies.
so now you are propelled awake
at 2 am to search for a mother
in an anxious god who thunders the night sky
panicking the sleep of little children.
But you are not scared
In the face of familiarity—
you know these tunes like the back of your hand,
you have sunken into slumber in their lullabies before;
The deranged bellowing of your
young mother’s ancient anger calls to you
like a siren of barren belonging
& you lie awake
hungry for your mother’s hands
who is far away, lost in the farmlands
of despair determined to escape
you
on nights like these when the
safety of the day’s busyness has surrendered
you lazily fill up your lungs,
as if your breath isn’t just another legacy
of a generational rush that you inherited.
but, at 6, no one tells you
that pretence is a costly endeavour
that even an anxious god could never fully upkeep
you are somebody’s, born abandoned—
so you stop fiddling with your blanket &
reach for tonight’s anxious god
awaiting the impending doom of sunlight,
dreaming of all the magical ungodly warmth
you never felt
curled up
in a single fraction
of your mother’s
precious guarded time.
the thunder has mellowed now
even its despair has stopped bickering;
desperate to reach for its dwindling anger
but you laugh at this display of lazy bestiality—
Have you seen my mother, you recite
Have you felt her anger for me across your skin.
*
Coexistence
Yesterday I spilled the one coffee cup
that was certain in its historical arrival to my mornings
& grumbled ‘never mind’
as the sharp edges of its remains bickered on
‘the world goes on’ children get killed &
adults get born out of their wits.
Today rain slammed the patio of
my reluctant home & I was left
cradling my coffee hot & heavy in
my mother’s worn-out cup
wondering how long, until she plants
the final flowers of my remembrance
to romance my ill-fittingness to this world
is a radical act of buffoonery
I know, I know
but on some days like this—
when the world temps me
with its promise of a tender wilderness
I imagine letting all this heaviness in my heart
dance for a while.
*
Wild Flowers
I want to be held//
transcend my body as a radical
affirmation to this world.
I want to unearth myself in wistful language//
gaze into a lover’s eyes
& think enough of this thinking.
I want to sing melodies of phantom memories//
remember my father like he is:
a dying man’s witness
to a grazing bullet.
I want to weave lavender flowers into my hair//
love my mother, whose anger
is a withering flower
decomposing to memory
in ash burn lavender.
I want to dream like I haven’t tasted ambition//
the worn out battlefield remains
my body dancing to a symphony,
echoing the lonely dreams
of my stolen longings.
I want to honour the deepest forms of my violated love//
turn it into a prayer,
a home to rest
& a life to live.
Most of all, I want all this sensational grief to dance a little//
dreams of mountains of never ending belongings
lush in the ambience of senseless loving.
To rest in a hope for this world is a radical act of buffoonery. I know, I know//
this life hasn’t yet become a plantation
of wild flowers
that don’t need tending.
***
Panchami is a law student from Bengaluru, India, who loves coffee, books, and hiding in various corners of the world.
