curated by Rony Alfandary
The winter 2021-22 poetry section of C.20 hosts some new voices as well as revisits from familiar ones. We are all still coping with the new plights Covid-19 is hoisting upon us as well as the old existential issues we are doomed, and perhaps blessed, to be dealing with: everlasting themes of love, life, beauty and death. Ben Keatinge from Ireland and Sumantra Nag from India join David Green from the other side of the globe in Australia in sharing their distinct voices.
Please send us your responses and poems to be included in the next issue of C.20
Rony Alfandary
Poetry Editor
September 2021
Sumantra Nag
HOUSE WINDOWS
The windows of my childhood
Look down at me
A counterpart to the living memory
With which I look up at the house.
They are like eyes the glass squares
On painted white wooden frames
Staring down from their fixed immobility.
Do they remember me on the other side
In my indoor life sixty years ago
On the polished maroon floor?
At the lassitude of sunset
With the three windows open
While we shuffled inside
A family growing up into a life.
Singing songs in the gathering darkness
To the clouds edged with a gilded mist
Looking out to the scene of a fort standing
Four centuries old and steeped in myth.
The full unhindered view for two decades.
But they have taken from me
And I have unknowingly
Endowed them with my memory
Willing them to relive those years
While the dull gold of old sunsets
Is ingrained again in my sight
As I look up from the street
Into which I once looked down.
Sumantra Nag lives in New Delhi. He was a student at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University where he won an annual prize for his poetry. He later took a degree from Cambridge University. He has published his poems in The Journal of The Poetry Society (India) and in Indian Literature.
Ben Keatinge
Reading John Berryman in Corfu
Here, truly, blue begins
Hellenic ministrations
caiques coming in
harbour air, the sun
Henry and Bones within
mistrustful, overblown.
The isle is full of noise
the whiskey years roll past
a bootless wager,
Henry staggers down the beach
towel in hand
swaying, proclaiming.
Yet hundreds of swifts
have raced without singing
all week, they sleep in flight,
your poems, this constancy
are like siphon and glass
unsteady, overflowing.
The Christmas Card
In neat black ink
it comes each year
with parish dues,
and waits, alone,
unclaimed, for somebody
once here, a woman
now elsewhere. This card
will surely come again
next Christmas, its arrival
tolls my year
a distant bell
postmarked, sealed.
Children’s Graveyard, Letterfrack
Below a hill, a wood
behind a church, a gate
through the gate are stones
on the stones, names
beside the names, toys
above these stones
the innocence of clouds.
Ben Keatinge is a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He is editor of Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (Cork UP, 2019) and his poems have been published, most recently, in The Dalhousie Review, Cyphers, Irish Pages, Orbis and Agenda. He is one of ten Irish poets currently being mentored under the Dedalus Press Poetry Mentorship Programme.
David Green
After Night Rain
Rain drops instil silence,
The soft patter demands reflection.
Mist obscures the distance,
No need to look further,
The frog is happy in his pond.
After night rain,
The sun seeks to break
Through a maze of branches
Where leaves glisten
And droplets fall.
Day brightens
As with a brush stroke
Clouds shift and branches sway
Uplifted in the early breeze;
Birds call, unseen and moving,
The frog silent now,
The dark pond still.
In the Service of Clouds
In the service of clouds
The mountains sit and draw
Thoughts not possible
On the teaming plains.
Mist and last year’s leaves
Speak of another world,
A different way of being,
A softer breeze.
Under grey skies I walk
On damp paths over trodden
By those seeking healing
In mountain air.
They breathe something
Rain-clear and rare above
The humid valleys below
Overrun with suburbs.
I sit in the mountains
Droplets forming on sill and rail,
The fluorescent green overwhelms;
Last year fires burned this way.
Renewal
Under dull skies, out walking,
The rain-rinsed air unmoving,
I hear the stream sigh
In hidden gorges.
Under lush trees the grass
Is as thick and green as England,
Last summer’s fire blackened trunks
Reborn with fresh sprigs.
Native grasses thrive and shrubs bloom
Where ash soil lay a few months ago.
My stick prods the earth as my steps
Pass the familiar made new each time.
By the post and rail fence mansions grow
Where pines used to be.
David Green is a part-time educator, poet and freelance writer with a keen interest in Lawrence Durrell’s Mediterranean world. In 2012 he made a radio documentary on Durrell and Henry Miller inspired by their wartime correspondence. David lives in Sydney, Australia with his wife, Denise and two sons.