‘Moisture Appends the Subtext’: Three Poems by Tabish Nawaz
Photo: Karan Madhok
Poetry: ‘I breath to fluidize the gravels / but they fall back / like the debris in a city / bombed for months.’
Stain
You speak in your silence
eyes turn like pages
moisture appends the subtext.
I let my feelings tell you
of the nothingness swaying within me.
The music expands,
spinning gravity out of our vacuums.
I measure words, but
when the surface no longer exists,
they lose weight.
*
Father’s Funeral
Death lurks in each thing, your smile
as it shines with its curvature
carries within a flatness
gravitating along the slope
to a sad corner
where all that happens sediments,
solidifies into a common destiny
immutable, untouched by our actions.
All those you love make a beeline
to your grave, vying for your glimpse
as you are lowered into the dust, unaware
that what remained anonymous to itself
lifts like wisps of smoke to the heavens.
*
Incubation
A verse dries within my veins,
much blood flows over it,
yet it never softens,
though sometimes it fragments into particles,
sediments in the bottom of my heart.
I breath to fluidize the gravels
but they fall back
like the debris in a city
bombed for months.
Sitting aside in a corner,
I watch the procession passing by.
After the dust settles, I trudge ahead
carrying a shovel,
dragging it along the breast of time,
feeling with the fingers its pulse,
where the skin is softest.
The shovel pulsates with my heaving,
revealing within
a crevice to a distant land
where the first word
is yet to come out.
Weary of contaminating the air with my sighs,
I slump breathless along the fence.
My nails peel off, the heart explodes
into a kaleidoscope of butterflies
perching over the barbed wire,
in an arrangement of a poem.
***
Tabish Nawaz teaches Environmental Science and Engineering at IIT Bombay. He has published a poetry collection The Ornaments for Silence (Hawakal, 2023) and a short-story collection Opening Clouds, Fermented Rain (Hawakal, 2020). His short stories, poems and essays have been published or are forthcoming in Indian Literature, Scroll, Outlook, The Wire, Tint Journal, nether Quarterly, Madras Courier, The Bombay Review, The Bangalore Review, The Critical Flame, Woolgathering Review, The Punch Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2021 and 2023, among other venues. You can find him on Instagram: @tabish_nawaz_87 and Twitter: @Tabish_Shajar.
