Amaryllis
Scarlet loudspeakers, four,
announce the end of ambient sound:
the clatters, the clangours, the cacophonalias
that plague our city; they mean to calm,
leaving a bulb when their tower's down,
their hosts of pollen flown,
to be potted again if we so choose
after rest in a dark place
to blare out and hush once more -
the trumpets I see this morning, all four,
now raised to declare
the likely arrival of angels.
Performance
A cluster of thin white swords opens her act,
parts nights that are closing.
We need deserts to call out the stars
but not when we watch her.
She's our resident performer,
the night-blooming Cereus we still mistakenly call
Star of Bethlehem, drawing us out to the balcony
to watch her open, open up night
till the heavens take over
and a cast of thousands steps out,
all unknowns, except for the three
I still mistakenly call
Dog, Great Bear, Plough,
unable to let go the comfort of error
and lightened enough to applaud.
Calls
At high pitches and perches,
at their most confident,
crows; and at closing time
koels spreading their hidden agendas
publicly without pause.
They'll never hush
to let us more clearly hear
a squirrel's morse
staccatoing down a tree-trunk
her young one's trying to climb.
So let it go.
There's a voice we're unable to find
and light in the garden's beginning to dip -
a woman's voice boldly repeating
nam-myoho-renge-kyo.
Adil Jussawalla was born in Bombay in 1940 and went to school there. He left it in 1957 to study Architecture in London but dropped out. He read English Language and Literature at Oxford and worked in London, primarily as an English language teacher, after graduating. He has lived mainly in Bombay with his wife Veronik after returning to the city in 1970. Books of poems: Land's End,1962, revised edition 2020.; Missing Person, 1976. Trying to Say Goodbye, 2011,
The Right Kind of Dog, 2013, Gulestan (chapbook) 2017, Shorelines, 2019, The Tattooed Teetotaller and Other Winder, 2021. Books of Prose: Maps for a Mortal Moon, 2014, The Magic Hand of Chance, 2021. A book of poems, fiction, and nin-fiction: I Dreamt a Horse Fell from the Sky, 2015.Anthologies: New Writing in India (1974), Statements (co-edited with Eunice de Souza), 1976. Honours: Sahitya Akademi Award (for Trying to Say Goodbye), Tata Literature Live Poet Laureate for 2021.