The poems in Durga Prasad Panda's These, My Hands, Aren’t Actually Mine (Red River) revel in their own madness.
Let the rest of the world follow its own logic, says the poet, who prefers to wander in the wild and the uncharted.
This collection is part of the Hummingbirds Chapbook Series edited by Ashwani Kumar. The series is a joint initiative of Red River and Indian Novels Collective.
Excerpt: Poems From ‘These, My Hands, Aren’t Actually Mine’
The poet is fascinated by the ‘intrigue’ a poem creates—that elusive fluidity, mystically beautiful like a dream
Summary
Door
Over there, the door
Stands like the dilapidated
Skeleton of my dreams.
Besides the sad grammar
Of opening and closing
What else is there to a door?
The door
Just leans upon the burnt bricks
Of our past
Carrying the dead weight
Upon its hunched shoulders.
(Translated from Odia by the poet)
Hand- 3
On the sleek floor
of your body,
could it be my own hand
that dances in the dark
on its five legs?
A Butterfly In Konark
Hovering lazily
Over
The filigreed
Gyrating bodies on the walls
Of Konark, a vagrant
Polka-dotted
Butterfly sits awestruck
On the taut nipple
Of a voluptuous nautch girl
Wondering
When exactly the flower
Turned so hard!
(Durga Prasad Panda is a bilingual poet, translator and critic)
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