Menka Shivdasani
From Safe House, published by Paperwall Media & Publishing Pvt Ltd (2015)
Earth Mother
Time to stop navel-gazing; there are forty-five rings on the palm tree that has grown out of the full, fat earth inside you, and look at those leaves, still swaying, when by now they should have dried into flat roofs and woven spaces! Forty-five years is a long time to have nourished the birds and their many-beaked tongues, pricking sharp into your tender coconut seeds, plucking out the white and liquid flesh, sweet despite the scaly outer skin. Forty-five years is a long time, and the roots go deep, snaking through the soft and airy spaces beneath the ground. Pluck them out. Pluck out the rough and edgy bark, the trunk that bites into your flesh, the roots that rip you slowly apart. That tree has grown inside you for too long, and thrust its way outside in obscene ways; let go, and let the earth inside rediscover the fresh new blades waiting to grow.
Homemaker
It's time to break the kitchen, take your fires elsewhere, watch time and space curl up, waft out through windows. Just one last time, hear the clanging of the steel, recognise the drawers no longer fit; they scrape and drag along channels tucked inside. The workmen said these granite slabs would never splinter; they did not speak of tilted angles, wooden cracks that would widen, swell, stay stubborn on their hinges, refusing access to the sharp-edged tools inside. They did not speak of choked-up pipes, and roach-infested drains. You wipe the spills off shining stone, but what's the use? Stay quiet now, and watch the hammers fall.
Nursery Rhyme for a Second Childhood
Shut the door, empty the mind. It's time to leave the world behind. And when this nursery rhyme has bled, find the old woman in the head. Strip her down, claw her toe, tell her it's time for her to go, and when she is no longer there, sweep up every last grey hair. Then pick yourself up from the floor, open the lock again and run from the ghostly faces that have begun to settle upon those ageing eyes, fluttering around like pesky flies, and when you've clawed that face away, turn back, and find me there.