| Hom Raj |
Posted
on 12-Mar-01 11:18 PM
Hey folks,
Here is one poem that has been published. Some of my poetry is pretty abstract and surreal, especially in Nepali. This poem I don't think a lot of people would find surreal though. It's pretty straightforward. I just tried to depict one aspect of Nepal's contemporary life in a poetic format. It was published last spring in Strategic Confusion, poetry journal from Boulder, Colorado. It's not a nationally circulated journal, but it features a couple of well-known poets so it was nice to be with those guys. Enjoy.
All critical comments are very welcome!
THE KEROSENE STOVE
The kerosene stove has no home.
Monday by the water bucket, Tuesday by the leg of the bed,
sometimes greeted by the hand, sometimes by the foot,
its face kissing the burnt bottoms of skillets,
aluminum saucepans, kettles, pressure cookers.
It is really unfortunate. It had bad karma to be married to this house.
It was a dowry, now it nestles
by rice sacks in the corner, or underneath the bed that squeaks
like the mice in the ceiling
so that neighbors know the whole world about you,
but hey, who cares what they think?
The rice sack is hungry, its belly empty.
Potatoes complain, tomatoes moan,
There are the usual cracks from the bitter gourds.
A black and white TV flickers in the evening.
The Nepalese delegation to the United Nations
voted its approval of the American proposal.
The Crown Prince has felicitated the soccer team
upon its departure for the Asian games.
Her Royal Highness has felicitated
an organization that teaches women to knit.
In the day a radio made in China sings about love.
The cups are steel,
they’d burn the fingers of the unaccustomed,
but anyway tea has to be served and the housewife
is a good finance minister for such a nation,
these steel cups are her credentials.
She’s a good friend of the stove,
it fattened him for his B.A., B.Ed., M.A.,
certificate from the Kwality Computer Institute,
certificate from the Fluorescent Language Institute,
M.Ed., LLM, a lawyer,
a lecturer in socioeconomics and anthropology
from 6 a.m. to 8 a.m. at the campus and
from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. a teacher of English
at the Celestial Stars Secondary School.
He teaches, he writes, he attends conferences
but mosquitoes, those mosquitoes don’t give a damn about his bigness.
And as for the river,
the fetid microbial juice of the garment factory,
juice of the distillery, molasses of sewage,
the sugar cane pulp of a million stomachs,
it doesn’t respect him, it just likes his nose.
What about the Gorkhapatra, the Kantipur, the Kathmandu Post?
The eyes first want to eat the ads. Any new schools?
The ads tease you, let you down. Your friend
is the stove, it was there before any of the jobs, its smell
has seeped into the linoleum, the concrete floor
of this room and the last one too.
What is a job anyway? Pushing the sun
down the hill every day, that's what they say.
That’s what they do, the big guys, displace a thousand suns,
a thousand stoves, every day more sugar cane pulp.
But as for us, the rest of us,
bigness never rises above the surface of the paper.
- Hom Raj Acharya
|
