Government Rice and other poems

Radha Jyoti Nur

Government Rice 

Polymer sacks of government rice.
Father says, No rice, no meal.           
Sacks stacked star-wards
& lit on fire in a warehouse
doored by uniforms.
The teeth of smoke from their cigarettes
& the halo of smoke
from their long, red guns.

Drying Rice

She squats, elegant on haunches,
fingers a pebble: plucked from a bed of grains &
tossed, like a wish or sea-
shell, to the ocean of gravel-
road by wet fields: rice
laid on woven covers, glistens, the wind pulls water from:
water coaxed by the wind, soothed by the song of
her soft flap of skin & taut muscle tossing a
bamboo plate: above which grains catch
catch in the air like popcorn, or bubbles
trailing a song from the Bapak’s roaming bicycle.

It’s Like That 

I can tell your spirit is malnourished.
You have been wandering alone for aeons
with nothing but a lone star to guide you.
There is food for orphans: those with nowhere to go.
I’ll pour you a glass: water
with orange slice, a little sugar.
You see that stone bottle gourd?
                        How it is carved bone-
dry, marrowless, only to carry rivers?
Each               day                I               tend               this               stove-
top, sweep these tiles.
It’s true, he gambled. Drank my money.
            My breast grew dry
as a bone-socket..
            I had only ten fingers to count.
I could not continue. Something must change.
I've left that man with a slingful of baby
I’ve carried over plains.
It took twenty thousand circles
of my dust broom,
a single sweep of the heart.
            This wind, if it enters,
will slice you clean open.
I have made the most
of this wind.
It’s like that.
Dear, Darling, Baby.
            It’s like that.

The Nightwatcher

This earth-coloured sugar

I made under the moon:

a moon half-full, half-ripe,

just like these sliced orbs

that were once the sap

nestled inside the

stem of a coconut flower

I drummed with a finger's ear

& waited to hear

music: the tap

of nectar into

daun-wrapped funnels,

into bowl-shaped pans

I laid across a fire, glided

my ladle smooth

over its silk.  Around me,

night thickened to dark-

ness. I became it’s silk

shirring me with cricket cries.

I did not sleep.

I whispered to the stars & fruit-bats,

“If touched, I’ll quiver–molten–

expand.”