The River

In Madurai,

City of temples and poets,

Who sang of cities and temples,

Every summer

A river dries to a trickle

In the sand,

Baring the sand ribs,

Straw and women's hair

Clogging the watergates

At the rusty bars

Under the bridges with patches

Of repair all over them

The wet stones glistening like sleepy

Crocodiles, the dry ones

Shaven water-buffaloes lounging in the sun

The poets only sang of the floods.

He was there for a day

When they had the floods.

People everywhere talked

Of the inches rising,

Of the precise number of cobbled steps

Run over by the water, rising

On the bathing places,

And the way it carried off three village houses,

One pregnant woman

And a couple of cows

Named Gopi and Brinda as usual.

The new poets still quoted

The old poets, but no one spoke

In verse

Of the pregnant woman

Drowned, with perhaps twins in her,

Kicking at blank walls

Even before birth.

He said:

The river has water enough

To be poetic

About only once a year

And then

It carries away

In the first half-hour

Three village houses,

A couple of cows

Named Gopi and Brinda

And one pregnant woman

Expecting identical twins

With no moles on their bodies,

With different coloured diapers

To tell them apart.