Ashwani Kumar, Mumbai, India
Short-horned, slender desert locusts
swaying like a troop of nautch girls
stop in the abandoned Seven Islands
for a brief layover.
Amidst the raging solitude, they
perform an impromptu show
of belly dancing for wealthy lemurs
and famished flying foxes in the city.
They are everywhere—
on stones, wood, fig-trees, vines, olives.
They are numerous and numinous,
pious and treacherous.
Propagating eggs of carnal joys,
they fill public parks,
bus stands, railway stations.
With wounds in their ragged thighs,
jobless locusts clear blocked drainage
in the slums, demanding
free tickets for travelling home.
Some blue-stocking locusts enter
the porcelain green houses, build nests
with the dead skin of their curled wings,
settle like the lovers of my step-father.
Others are busy in isolation camps
testing the inflected blood of patients,
serving jaundiced honey to grieving doctors.
It is a ravishing pomegranate summer.
Neither are the gods vexed
nor hermits excited
about the pouring black rain of tears.
We must endure and toil
without complaining—
the unexpected carnival of locusts!
Ashwani Kumar is a Mumbai-based poet, writer and professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. His anthologies My Grandfather’s Imaginary Typewriter and Banaras and the Other have been published by Yeti Books and Poetrywala respectively. His poems, translated in Indian languages and Hungarian, are noted for their “lyrical celebration” of garbled voices of memory and subversive “whimsy” quality. He is co-founder of Indian Novels Collective which brings classic novels of Indian Literature to English readers. His other major scholarly contributions include Community Warriors (Anthem Press), Power Shifts and Global Governance (Anthem Press), Global Civil Society: Poverty and Activism (Sage International) and Migration and Mobility (forthcoming, Routledge). He also writes for Financial Express, The Print, Business Standard, The Hindu, Indian Express, DNA, Open Democracy, amongst others.
