Poems by Arun Paria

Bride, 1970

A new bride has come, the palanquin has left. 
Those who’ve come late — the old viewers: grim.
Brittle-finger mothers measure the skin
of the girl. Her ornaments’ weight. Hair. Teeth.
The onlookers grow. This new girl’s laugh —
Tell me, tell me, ma, will she be tame?

Will she not blind our boy (for how long they themselves
could)? But a new girl shall possess new new tricks!
Carrying paddy from the paddy fields to the paddy pots,
pots to the oven. Oven to the mill.
The animals of the flower-bed night bathe
the cattle, feed the cattle, smell of cow urine.

Love. Who calls its obtuse name? The clarinet calls.
At the midnight play, Majnun bawls. The girl, too, weeps with him.
Till her man appears. To bring her — to bed.
Till the birds cackle, the sun appears. The girl wakes up to sweep
the floor for another ten years.
Now when the cowshed is clean, her daughter goes there to read.

Groom, 2000

Soaked rice, onion
with green chillies
by paddy field.
Dal, anchovy fry
at noon.
Gur
in winter,
bael
in summer,
death
in every season.

Drenched in the sun,
Sahu-bride ran
to the sea,
to hunt Pola Giri,
to drown
his fishing trawler:
she didn’t return.
Her callow groom
on a tuberose bed
bayed
at the moon.

Tephra, 2019, 1943

A pebble hits and smashes
my morning mirror.
Now I am cold as a stone,
stand so remote,
before the household’s
four-oven fire
peering at the glow,

imagining—
what a strange block of coal
my great-grandmother poked
out from the belly of the earth
in forty-three’s summer.

Instead of being dour,
she carried the flaming charcoal home
to cook for her boys
burnt taro roots.