This is like flashback. Going back to recount something from 2009. And a good thing that brought my 2009 to a enthusiastic close. My poem "Innuendo in the Cinema Theatre" won the 2nd prize for the 2009 Prakriti Foundation open contest. Prakriti Foundation, Chennai, is "interested in hearing the many voices of interest that make up the diverse culture of India. The foundation wishes to share information and wisdom that many of the giant scholars of India and abroad have to give us"...
The contest was part of its Poetry with Prakriti program. You can read all the three winners here.
My poem is pasted below:
"Innuendo in the Cinema Theatre"
For Robert Hass
This a story of two opponents
who face each other, count.jpg)
silence with just an ‘ahem’.
One guesses very well
something hanky panky
went on indoors, curtained;
while the sheepish other
is embarrassed but sure that
his mate of henna beard
has cheated behind his back.
They believe, she can see,
love and kingdom is a game.
The trot of the horses and
the thundering canons are
only a few of the things
that make her chest rise
higher than the hillside on
the tremulous silver screen.
With this scene where
Satyajit Ray’s chess player
is caught unbuttoned
after returning back to
the game from a quick
love tiff with his silly wife,
the girl knows there will
never be such parables
for her even in the twilight.
In the story, trumpets play
in technicolour hands
hundred horns hoot away.
The magnificent blare
ascertains someone has
cheated and yet, has won.
Men and parodied mules,
women fleeing with babies,
roll like a carriage song.
It remains unclear who
will blink first to disentangle
overtures with their hands.
The script is in a language
she speaks but is remote
for an innuendo in her heart.
Elephants in gold brocades,
climactic chatter, tingly rosewater,
turn her lips butterfly wings
because she will see them
again and again on a screen
of her unbridled dreams.
Lastly, the soldiers march
in and the players stare:
two split fish stranded
unable to remember any
moments of lovemaking
or cheating on a pawn.
They half-rise, she waits.
Her lover leaves through
a door he takes with him:
like shadows mingling dark,
countries drawn in lines,
the two separate.
I wrote to Robert Hass in utmost excitement through his poet wife Brenda Hillman and this is what he wrote back after seeing my poem (my dedication refers to Hass' poem "Heroic Simile"):
"Thanks for your dedication and congratulations on your prize. Your
poem is very poignant to me. It gets at something about the way movies
place the world before (us) as a source of meditation, at the same time that
we are helpless before the way its images enter us. Good luck with
your future work.
Robert Hass"
That's a good opening to 2010 I guess, since his reply came on Jan 4. And know what, Trillium Magazine, where I had submitted nearly a year ago, suddenly sent me a mail saying they'd accept all the poems I had submitted. Now more on that later.
Image from the Internet: film poster of Shatranj ke Khiladi (The Chess Players) by Satyajit Ray
