I paint pictures and write verse. Most these painting are ambiguous, from one angle they show a landscape and from another a river goddess. Some painting were created in Pontfract before I left, other completed in India. Only Sister Mahi was extensively reworked in Yorkshire.
The strangest of this small collection was written, although I had heard his name for the first time that day, on the night that the Gurjarati master poet Adil Mansoori died.That afternoon I heard Saroop Dhruv, the radical Ahmedabad poet read her Sabarmati epic poem.
Sabarmati - An Evocation
They named their first born:
Adarsh – ‘the ideal’ – torn,
with little choice, he married Asha.
With little choice he married
‘Hope’. She, it was, who carried
the Sabarmati – Narmada
Sister Mahi
Brian Lewis
‘She’ the black, river, 'He' a buck male
forcing the goddess, the expansive 'He'
was fair with wheatened skin. Their tale
was told by the young boatman:
‘She
comes twice each month, once on the night
of the full moon and upon a black, another
night, the Ocean takes her. She breathes in light.'
Across age this a brother talks to sister and to brother
It is a Gujarati folk tale, still powerful –
Woman/Man, Man/Woman ,- two types of water.
She resists but Chandra, the moon, will pull
them together. She is the churner’s daughter.
her mother laboured here beneath a lunar tide.
Fresh water into salt, a union made world wide
They coupled at this place, She took his light,
he Her darkness and so the river thrived.
living with nature but then the soul of night
grew tired of simply flowing.
Builders strived
to corset her with concrete, pulled in her waist.
changed her contours, rubbished her, one shore
scum, the other pure and clear. Then they laced
and fashioned her, made Her the Ocean's whore,
polluted Her. Her children went to sweat shops.
Pimps, they sold her to the highest bidder. Wasted
her till she grew thin and weak, left pap and slops
of food on Her hard bed. Where Chandra tasted
sugar there was ash, teeth gone yet she would smile.
They had forgotten that She travels with a crocodile.
Your Breast To Mine Sweet Ocean
Brian Lewis
First the hints of his presence:
a quickening
the moving of currents below my surface
a gentle shudder through myself which is myself
resignation, opening.
He is not the storm.
We lie together:
your flank touching mine,
hand holding hand,
toe touching toe,
I think on Siva,
then the earth moves.
You are my welcomed lover
I place the sun sign at the entry place
and welcome you.
Narmada – The Joy Giver
Brian Lewis
I found a stone
Crafted by the Narmada it did not conform
to the plastic sphere
Its imperfection was its strength
Shaped by water and cracked by
clashing rocks it descended to here
in slow time
sometimes driven by the monsoon,
sometimes still for centuries
these stones are signs for tomorrow’s world
In this natural shaping each stone
is a lingam sacred to the God of rebirth
and grave yards, Lord of birth and renewal
Lord Siva
Protect the speechless stone,
Protect us and all the creatures.
Mahi's Letter To Auntie Kali
Brian Lewis
Send me white skulls I need to make another necklace,
lend a mace and scimitar I need to thread men's heads on twine,
cut off their hands and feed them to my crocodile.
Filth everywhere.
Medicine packaging upon the route down to my contour.
My tongue lolls out. A god must lick this land, and clean it.
Send me some baby crocodiles.
Siva husband sleeps, a python wrapped around his foot,
this work is woman's work.
Lock Up The Poets First
For Adil Mansoori and Saroop Dhruv
‘Lock up the poets first’.
Me: 'I am angry. You lock up writers.'
She was a Maoist - we often talked of books.
Mary: ‘Do not ask questions
whose answers you already know.
Poets are dangerous’
Poets are dangerous
They ask too much.
They say I have:
my ‘individual truth’,
‘I know wrong from right!
this is a tipsy - topsy world
of Concrete, Water, Plastic.
Each one of us a global town,
They say this is a global problem
which needs renewal.
Earth, Air and Creatures
Lock up the poets
The River of Paper - Brian Lewis
Unfinished text
He did not go to the Forest at fifty
Rajendra went to the river
He said : ‘Below this flow of water,
far below in fissures opened yesterday –
far below – there is a River of Paper.’
A translator did not describe it
for we knew of the tradition
that with Prayag
there is a third river where the
fauna and flora are nouns and adjectives
and especially verbs (doing words)
these float with the tide suddenly changing
meanings and histories.
Soft-back books, news, gospels of divine love,
receipts from the Handloom Corporation Store,
the Times of India, bindi packaging but also bus tickets to Anand thrown
to the our sacred land, and lavatory paper float together
well below the Sabarmati's concrete riverside.
There when churned to mulch are enough to
block the estuary
and make the man-made plug hole
a useless dam man-made dam
'Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow'
said the Narmada
Plastic and Concrete - Brian Lewis
He said, 'Yes, yes I know flying kites can be plastic
but plastic is still harmful, for when a kite rips
as it will, it cannot be repaired and
unlike paper will not return to earth.'
She feared concrete more than plastic.
‘It is the heaviness, even when refined water
is added, that I find it frightening.
It comes in plastic sacks, mixed with
the water from the Narmada it settles
and holds the Sabarmati in a tight corset.
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