In the voice of a bird
Out in the courtyard
having spotted the muse
her vocal folds bloom,
shifts shape, hues,
feathers of weather
with a chestnut skirt
& deep purple top
before it mirrors
the descending oop-oop
of the mate-chasing
Pheasant Coucal.
Its eyes – drunk red, lucid,
like arils of a fruit – now
in a tangle, fidgeting
forever between
the flesh and the seed.
Pomegranate
Shopping for veggies and roots
I keep gawking at the fruits:
Apples from Simla, Anars
from Afghan that the friendly
vendor says will cost me a bomb.
One of them
open-wound red, calyx-crowned
shows how easy is it for a knife
to get drowned
In memory’s bitter-sweet flesh:
Of a pale Mathalam plant
that grew behind
my grandfather’s home.
It’s tender boughs
weighed down by red
tree ants and fruits – sparse, scarred
permanently by insect bites,
Symbols of fertility vows.
Of colours and metaphors in movies
by Sergei Paradjanov. The name
of a certain Mughal princess in love
and the ditch-in-the-heart sickness
that found a pun for grenade in
the Pomegranate form.
When cut open
If it gives your hands
A deep red & purple tan
and doesn’t go Kaboom,
It’s got to be a fruit
from Kabul.
If it pulses like a piece of art
It can be cruel: a high-speed
photograph of a thigh
hit by projectile exploding arils
of bone marrow and blood.
Binu Karunakaran is a poet, translator and journalist based in Kochi, India. A recipient of the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship for writing, some of his poems were part of a group anthology A Strange Place Other Than Earlobes published by Sampark, Kolkata, in 2015.
