LATE SUMMER AND MORNINGS Poem by Anjum Hasan

Late summer, and mornings have nothing to do with evenings,
evenings untouched by mornings. The ghee light pouring over
streets and terraces out of a bottomless sky, loving everything
all morning, taking nothing back, concentrating in the small
gold champak flowers that men greedily balance on branches for.
Late summer sounds - dogs and nadeswarams, the last rites
of weddings, bikes with almost disco thundering, crack-lunged
buyers of old paper, buckets filling anew, and the butter light
melting in its own heat against compound walls and parked cars:
the generous light in which butterflies turn the same colour as the champak
stars among the last clumps of jacaranda, and the cassia tree flowering and
flowering in wilting yellow like no one told it to stop. Slow drip
of late summer thoughts - forgiving one's faults, everything becoming
a plan to find a place where it's always this late summer merge
between drums and bees knocking hard against panes, the dish-washing
clamour, and the flickering voices inside that one sits trying, with both
hands, to keep alive, not realising that this is that place, this is that place,
and when one does it's too late because the palms striped with sky
are thrashing about with something that almost has a human name,
and then it rains and rains and rains.

Later the children come out and collect in corners like wet ants.
The air is crowded with their new-born questions -
Are you pushing me? Is that a snake?