Hibiscus
Red resplendence
The fragrance of gangrene
I resent your obscene excesses
Fleshy, raunchy and ready
Amidst sickly verdure
You are
A bruise cracking to bleed
Under the precarious thinness of skin
A wound flaunting inflamed flesh
You won’t heal
I see those pollen crusts of suppuration
You resemble an ugly cicatrix
As you shrink and fall to death
You are a hateful bite mark
A raped girl attempts to erase
So brutally forced
A memento of conquest
You brim with crimson conceit
Yet you know no pain, no remorse
Your hue, primal scent
The practiced air of vulnerability
The gentle trembling in the breeze
All add to your spurious allure
You are
A menstruating whore
Who refuses to abstain from lust
Why are you so flamboyant?
Why such unabashed lechery
Carnal, baring all?
The tentacles of your colour
Hook to my pupil
Blinding me to all that is
Ultimately
Binding me to your deadly splendour.
(From the anthology ' A Strange Place Other than Earlobes' by five Indian poets. binisajil@yahoo.com )
Photograph by Muhammad Mahdi Karim
It is commonplace for poets to compare their lovers to flowers. A famous example is by Robert Burns: My love is like a red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June: / My love is like the melody / That’s sweetly played in tune." William Shakespeare reversed the practice, explicitly disavowing any such comparison:
ReplyDeleteMy mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
But here we have a different kind of reversal, with the flower itself being personified.
Edited this poem to suit a rhythm during my stressful asylum days: no transcription or translation; just a gentler bend in my own life's story mAde me relook and tread on this volume of Poems with a scissor sharpness in my brain that wanted to trim, trim, trim
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