Over the Street, a Hawk
It’s almost tomorrow
here. Can you catch up with the lip of it arcing through space?
— Alice Jones, ‘Leap’
in flight, scouring the earth;
from here—under its belly—‘it looks
like grace’: having
the heart ‘to follow whim
and pleasure’—sometimes it pitches
itself ‘out of the air’—like practising
‘free-fall’—‘the kind of dance’
we never learnt: how it hovers
for a while, like ‘swimming’
in a blue-grey ‘sea’, and then lofts
‘off at high speed’—how: ever
‘flying alone’—how under its wings
it brings patches of ‘night down
onto us, out of pink and blue’—how
elation, and quiet—that ‘darkness
hardly’ matters—how close to the sun
and never ‘sunstruck’—hawk—eye
of god—from hauk, hauke, havek,
hafoc, from what means ‘seize’
as in take what you will—the
permission ‘to follow whim
and pleasure’—how from here ‘it
looks like grace’
Note: Other than ‘seize,’ which is the meaning of the root word that ‘hawk’ is supposedly controversially derived from, all words and phrases in inverted commas have been taken from Alice Jones’s poems ‘Birds’ (May 1996), ‘Coast’ (May 1997), ‘Solo’ and ‘Light’ (January 1996), and ‘Reach’ (May 1997) from Poetry Magazine.
Town
Purnea, India
city/town/suburb, we call it whatever comes to our minds first—
at home, birds used to be a common sight: sparrows and mynah,
in English, the ‘mynah’ sounds different from its root word mainā
which comes from my mother-tongue; crows are associated
to thousand-year-old fables: one in which a crow is smart enough
to drop pebbles in a goglet/jug to raise water to the brim—we’ve
now done so by burning fossil fuels, and the seas are warming,
the water levels rising; in another story, the crow and I share our
first name—he’s the son of a god and has something to do
with a pot of elixir and flies for twelve days, which is uncommon,
other than for albatrosses that fly even for over a year at times
and love until death; no-one from my town has ever seen an
albatross, nor a seagull—both seabirds, and sometimes found
in the same areas; but most of us have loved until death—love,
here, is not letting go, instead it is knowing how to keep
it together—when grandma died, grandpa would speak little
other than her name, and wanted to leave; as if one could compel
god by wanting: after Jayanta, the crow, pecked at Sitā’s
chest once and pulled out a piece of flesh, he could not compel
Rāma to forgive by wanting forgiveness; grandpa left under a year
after grandma did, and everyone praised their love; when one of
us fell in love a year ago, they bought bright wrapped presents,
sipped soft drinks every day, and threw the bottles out in the
street—‘plastic’ bottles, which if not recycled, may land inside
albatrosses and stuck around the necks and beaks of crows, mainā
and sparrows
Carrying: Part-Ghazal
after Zeina Hashem Beck
In my religion, when loved ones die their remnants
(from French remenoir, remanoir: ‘remains’)
are set sail on water, we have not much to do with graves—
but burial is a process, that water leaves its mem-
ories on land, it carries
memories (from Latin memoria, from memor:
‘mindful, remembering’)
between
graveyards—carries its memories from graves
to graves;
that even after death our bodies
must be heavy (from Old English hefig, from German
heben: ‘heave’, ‘lift up’) like metal logs that cannot dis-
solve in water, and water makes of our bodies
memories and takes into unmarked graves.
(rid: from Old Norse rythja: ‘to clear’, to ‘free from—’)
*
In carrying, even water
is bathed in broken light (from Old English lēoht, from
Greek leukos: ‘white’) from between trees—like Christ is
from His broken windows
in a church.
In Bangalore, the streets flow like water
—in the general rush of things, people find ways to sur-
render (from Old French rendre, from Latin reddere: ‘give
back’, ‘submit
for consideration’) or the opp-
osite of it; so many accidents, often the streets mimic grave-
yards like water—even where churches,
mosques and temples, where each God watches
from, sitting upon a throne
while Their people walk between water and into their graves—
Prayer for My Mother as a Child
after Miriam Nash
Let me carry myself like a quiet emptiness in her school bag,
watch over her from inside a pocket I zipped up earlier
from the inside—‘inside’, say ‘her heart’; that I’ll talk to her
years ago without her knowing.
I’ll visit her warmly in dreams and she’ll only know years
later I was made from her not long after.
Jayant Kashyap has published two pamphlets and a zine, ‘Water’ (Skear Zines, 2021). He is the winner of the Poetry Business New Poets Prize 2024 for his third pamphlet, ‘Notes on Burials,’ selected by Holly Hopkins and forthcoming from Smith | Doorstop in 2025.