Sudeep Sen

New Delhi, India

Sudeep Sen’s [www.sudeepsen.org] prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Rain, Aria (A. K. Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House), and Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury). He has edited influential anthologies, including: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor), World English Poetry, and Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi). Blue Nude: Anthropocene, Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize) and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. Sen’s works have been translated into over 25 languages. His words have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Telegraph, Financial Times, Herald, Poetry Review, Literary Review, Harvard Review, Hindu, Hindustan Times, Times of India, Indian Express, Outlook, India Today, and broadcast on bbc, pbs, cnn ibn, ndtv, air & Doordarshan. Sen’s newer work appears in New Writing 15 (Granta), Language for a New Century (Norton), Leela: An Erotic Play of Verse and Art (Collins), Indian Love Poems (Knopf/Random House/Everyman), Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe), Initiate: Oxford New Writing (Blackwell), and Name me a Word (Yale). He is the editorial director of AARK ARTS and the editor of Atlas. Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.”

Poem completed 1st May 2020

Witherstone                                                                  

                for Fiona & Peter

The deaf don’t believe in silence.

Silence is the invention of the hearing.

— Ilya Kaminsky, Deaf Republic

1.

In bucolic,           translucent silence,                          I overhear:

stone-slates aligning themselves

                                                in tiered mosaics —

floor’s varying heights competing

                                                with rural mud-grass gradient —

sheep excitedly running downslope

                                to greet their master, seeking salmon —

a quartet of chickens in an open shed

                pursing their rear, revealing pink eggshells —

and Wye waters creating an unintentional arc,

                                                                verge of an immaculate oxbow.

2.

Sam[p]son and Delilah, Church and State

                                jostle, trying to carve their own space —

                a map whose coordinates appear flawed —

                fragmented like old Balkan fissures,

                                                like Brexit’s comedic miscalculations.

Tudor stone’s past — like a misleading folly —

                gradually withers away history and time

                                as erosion’s song-cycle prepares for a coda.

A perfectly-pitched aria or cantata

                                calibrates its modulation in this wet heavy air —

the frequencies unsure, like a directionless weather vane.

3.

Magnolia’s magnificence in the front garden,

its regalia in temporary full glory —

                before the snow-smitten air bites through its tree-bones.

In the large glass-paned sunroom,

a long red cylindrical punching bag hangs listlessly

                                waiting for an uppercut to deflect

a dangling modifier — a poet’s primal prerogative.

4.

A red metal kettle in the kitchen, excited by heat,

                whistles like an old steam engine on a disused rail track —

                                brewing rose, green and white infusions.

As I set aside the coffee story,

the large black cooking range

                                                mirrors an age-blackened timber lintel.

Therein lie unrevealed, unsaid stories —

                stored within chamfered beam’s wood cracks.

5.

                Wireless signal, desperately elusive here —

the valley’s rough music

                                rearranging the air-waves’ diatonic notes —

its common prayer bridging

                                the geographical distance between us

                                                                                in this limestone country.

6.

How topography fine tunes our sensibility,

                                                                landscape reshapes our psyche —

how everyday banalities of potatoes, animal farm,

                persistent rain can soothe our senses to calm —

how simplest of neighbourly gestures

                                cements communal intimacies,

                                                                                reorienting our dna.

7.

Morse code conveyed in silence —

                skyscape, ever changing,

                                                planktons floating on unreliable waves —

their dramatic formulations,

                shape-shifting cumuli,

                                                                thermal up-draughts

matching             a local brook’s innocent eddies.

8.

At an abandoned countryside churchyard,

                I pause at each gravestone

                                to decipher their ornate genealogical etchings —

their looped serifs hold still the heartbeat of many lifetimes.

It’s the kind of clock I want to measure time by —

                time that depends

                                                on the company of those who care —

                                time minutely layered

on this open windblown Herefordshire terrain —

                                                                an expansive canvas roll.

9.

Traversing a four-acre fenced land in borrowed Wellies,

                                my pugmarks leave a foreign imprint on this soil.

I find among the muddy squelch,

                a piece of dead bark. Its smooth weatherworn

seductive shape reminds me of an ancient whale,

                                its striated sanded-down skin bearing a script

                left undeciphered until now.

I am tempted to decode enjambment’s mystery,

                                                                                but I resist.

10.

Inside Witherstone,

the well-worn kettle-nozzle tweets again,

                                a trio of iPhones peal their pedestrian pings —

I choose not hear this uncoordinated medley.

                                                                In my imagined silence,

ceramic cup-stains graph every minute detail,

                letterform’s each ascender and descender ||

                                                as I drink my infinite cups

of bergamot oil infused tea                           without haste —

                                slow-staring at the sky’s ash-rose stories.