By Ashwani KumaR
Kafka in Town
I hear Kafka is in town —
dancing with cruel delight against the light,
singing songs of revolution
in the funeral procession of cockroaches.
Are you dreaming, Kafka?
A girl whistling through the streets of Panjim
is searching for you —
go, find her a lover,
or a bloodless god in the castle.
A day will come when Kafka
will be jailed in his fourteenth-floor home —
there will be no language left,
no traffic light will change —
only in the courts,
people will endlessly await the verdicts of unfamiliar hearings.
Kafka, between the two of us,
only one will walk away without an existence.
Pause for a moment, Kafka —
when I wake up, I realize
I am a lake, filled with frightened white flowers
Forest of Horses
Are there such things as a forest of horses?
It must have been a Sunday Summer
when I travelled without any roadmaps in Oklahoma —
moving between childhood and adulthood.
Navigating me
through ghost Cherokee turnpikes,
my son wakes me to warm, golden-brown sunlight —
a recurrent dream.
Strange, he’s at home in distant lands,
feasting on kettle-fried long red-neck potato chips.
Suddenly, I am alone in the eye of the tornado,
remembering the voice of ash-green women
on the radio, speaking
of the blood memory of the Chickasaw hunters.
Maybe the horses were there —
maybe they weren’t.
Some things arrive and vanish
as if no one watches the magic rite —
like a forest waiting for its final erasure.
Memory of Water
We live in the water.
There are many rooms in our home —
some as large as small continents.
We have named them after our exiled ancestors.
Between our kitchen and the laundry room
lie harbours no map remembers.
We sail from room to room
in bamboo boats,
exploring the languages of unbaptized fishes,
speaking of routes to drowned ships.
At night, the scent of millet and mango
fills our balconies, and we fall asleep
watching old films
of pirates planting herbal trees in the backyard.
Isn’t it true
that home is a nation without any border?
Sometimes, when I go out,
I only carry the memory of water.
Ashwani Kumar is a poet, political scientist and professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. Widely published, and anthologized in various Indian and International languages, his most recent collection of poems is titled Map of Memories (Red River, 2025).
Banner image is by Gene Devine downloaded from Unsplash.com