"Butterflies" and Other Poems

Butterflies

My sweet granny painted colourful flowers
on her pink arms
dangling half-limp off the armrest
of her rocking-chair
as blossoms sway in the wind.
And sure enough butterflies sat on them,
even tried to suck the nectar:
“My elixir’s all drained”, she would say
with a wince and a giggle.
It was years before I realised in a Zoology class
that they would sit there and try
to pierce her tissuepaperskin to draw
blood.
She used to serve us a platter of assorted sweetmeats for breakfast
No one can survive on all sweet, my father and uncle would chide, handing her her calcium supplements.
Turns out Butterflies can’t either.
They need minerals to survive.
That’s why they occasionally lap up crocodile tears.

The last I saw of them was at Granny’s funeral
fluttering over the faces of attendees and on her shroud.
White flowers hide colourful spots and stripes
in the ultraviolet spectrum, beyond our sight
a plane above our vision and comprehension,
a plane of butterflies, hummingbirds, and bees.

Now, scientists say Butterflies gave flowers
their colour, and not the other way round.


*

The Kashmir Market

“The Kashmir Market”, the sign read;
“Authentic produce of the Valley”, it promised.
I don’t buy any of it though.

Papier-Mache masks whose
eyeholes won’t accommodate
protective goggles.

The Pashmina doesn’t pass the ring test.
Well, it does, but their ring fits two-fingers,
two tactical glove-clad fingers, that is.
It isn’t virgin Pashmina.

Then there is the Saffron.
First off, it ain’t red enough,
not strikingly red as fresh
blood against green and on top
of that, it’s labelled
Zafran, not Kesar; It’d be a hard-sell.

And at the end, the Knotted Carpet with knots
that are too coarse to be able
to bear the wear
of boots, even the standard issue.

“Please Visit Again”, says the exit sign. I stifle
a smile.


*

Sappho’s Pool

Words are not petals, they are lilypads,
and every instance of their usage a raindrop.
As each hits the pool, the pads shift;
Queer how some go from the fringe to the centre.
Ripples radiate out, coalesce, and recenter.
Tap, Tap, Tap, for some freedom, for others confinement.
A pad shifts not only if the drop hits it but even if it hits its vicinity,
ever so slightly inching away, trembling, rocking, damping.
Some demure, timid, and modest, others feisty, brazen, and bold.
The pads collide, overlap, slip, subduct, or repel
to awesome and awful ends.
At times a drop hits just right, at the very edge,
furthest from the centre, but not outside it,
rendering it lopsided, or even flipping it altogether –
Literally turning it upside-down.

As for the drops themselves, they can’t stay on too long,
for the very nature of the pad is to repel what weighs it down
to maintain balance, as in equality not equity.
If you want to navigate the pool and negotiate the pads,
tread softly, wary and cautious, get the feet of a jacana –
wide-spanning but keen and precise, not diffused,
a pair of umbrellas growing from the sky, or a snowflake.

Still other times, the very air over the pool shifts
in response to temperature and pressure
and sets the pads adrift, at times silly at times nice.
Yet another time, fingers come to pluck the blossom,
forcing them away with vigour, as the frigid water turns bubbly.


Pitamber Kaushik is a writer, journalist, columnist, and researcher. He has previously written in over 60 publications across 31 countries, in 3 languages. His writing has appeared in dailies, periodicals, journals, and web outlets. His work has previously been published in Asia Times, The Hindu, The Telegraph India, The New Delhi Times, Cultural Weekly, and the New Humanist, among numerous others. He identifies as a Utopian Socialist.