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week of August 28 - September 3, 2006
Sankar Roy and Barbara Hasanat
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Sankar Roy
editors@writersalliance.net
Bio (auto)
Sankar Roy (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a winner of PEN USA Emerging Voices, associate editor of international poetry anthology, Only the Sea Keeps: Poetry of the Tsunami (Rupa & Co, Bayeux Arts) which was one of the three finalists for 2006 Benjamin Franklin Award and winner of Skipping Stone Honor Award. His poems have appeared or forthcoming in Bitter Oleander, Blue Color Review, Color Wheel, Diner, Pittsburgh City Paper, Runes and Whiskey Island. Sankar's recent project is creating an international website ( www.writersalliance.net ) to create a worldwide artistic and literary response against the genocide in Darfur.
The following work is Copyright © 2006, and owned by Sankar Roy and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsoever without written permission from the author.
From a roadside farm fire, smoke erupts
like god's autograph . This morning, I am again
passage-happy in my car. On I-80, my car throttles
behind the mile-long traffic, roadwork,
single lane my providence
for another fourteen miles. My luck
once took me away from my own clan when
whirlwinds, like desert flowers, covered my footprints
and a mirage appeared in the distance,
taking the shape of my yearning.
There was not enough space
for five siblings to grow in a small room.
There was not enough rice for all of us
in our mother's kitchen.
After living in a rich country for fourteen years,
I still have no CD player in my car. I cannot listen
to my favorite Hindi songs. I scan the car's radio
and stop at a priest howling on the bible station.
At roadside farms, Mexicans are picking produce
from the dry earth. Someday each hopes to be a citizen
like me. I understand the things that bind us are not our words.
Ungrateful
There is a tree in the background
in one of my childhood photographs.
But I cannot remember what the tree is called.
It is not a mango or a guava tree...
Once I knew its name, the texture of its leaves,
its fruit's fragrance. Now I forget it all.
Like an ingrate who eats dishes
and forgets what they are called, forgets the name
of his preschool teacher who taught him how to read,
forgets the face of a childhood friend
who took all the blame for not returning home
night of the festival.
What was the name of dish that our mother used to cook
with spinach and barley? What was the name of the god
who could fix almost anything in the universe?
Troubled Terrain
Is that a moon? No, it is a dark gash
through the sky's stomach, a bayonet scar.
Heaven bleeds through it, its black blood.
Do we remember that fireball?
Is that the Sun? No, it a searchlight
attached to a helicopter's belly.
Using it, they look for us. Hide
girls, hide behind a sand dune.
Are those wind marks?
Can we follow them to go where the wind goes?
No, they are a vulture's nail scratches.
Stay away from them.
Is that a well, that crack in the ground?
No, that is where a comet struck,
killing our camels, our men.
Lay a rock there, a desert flower.
Where is our mother? Why she is not going with us?
Mother has turned into a mirage.
Let's follow her hand signals
to reach to the place where
no one can hurt us any more.
Barbara Hasanat
Hbarb777@aol.com