Pramila Venkateswaran (Diaspora Dual Identities)

Pramila Venkateswaran

Dance Me To The End Of Love

--Leonard Cohen

 

Leonard’s voice deep, resonant,

sweeps me off my couch

and sends me waltzing across

the room in the arms of a voice

that ties my soul in soft pink ribbons

and puts a bow on it.

 

Sheila says she still sinks into the

nostalgia of Hindi love songs,

they feed her heart craving street food

and geetmala, and now years later she

dances to mushy songs like Leonard’s, despite

bad knees and opioids, who cares, she laughs.

 

Male baritones know how

to get hearts to beat. Even doddering

seniors like us open our eyes a little wider,

sway our hips and take a turn

holding onto chairs or a shirt

on a coat hanger, drunk in the musky

promise of an embrace, and that amazing second

before lips meet.

 

Dreams Tell The Truth Slant

 

Mom visits at night, always in light

young,                         sweeping in guests,

blurring my satisfaction or rage.

 

In my dreams, she remains un-swept by the wind

when she was poured into the ocean.

She collects the dust and forms her woman self,

 

opens a door to find me                      stays for a while.

Unfinished business, she says as she dissolves,

leaving me in a gray Long Island morning,

 

heavy with storm, blending into gray water,

my nights an open door          for the departed

to ghost-write my scripts.

 

It’s dangerous walking into a whiteout,

there is no path.          But I will myself to enter

the unseeable to complete the page.

 

 

Eternal Desire

 

From the T-junction in Chennai, or in my daydream

in New York, it’s like looking into a tunnel

 

and seeing our house--dark, trees melting

into black shadows. Sunset.

 

Amma would have turned the windows golden,

lit the lamps in the shrine. I feel her breath.

 

Her soul’s resting, the priest says. Here.

He has built a house of sticks in the yard

 

placed her favorite sari in it to lure her soul.

By the 13^th day, she bids farewell.

 

But I believe she’s wandering looking for light.

She wants me to be home lighting the windows.

 

But I am miles away keeping vigil,

unable to rescue our home or her.

 

 

Pramila Venkateswaran, poet laureate of Suffolk County, Long Island (2013-15) and co-director of Matwaala, is the author of Thirtha, Behind Dark Waters, Trace, The Singer of Alleppey, Tamil Dalit Feminist Poetics, and Exile is Not a Foreign Word. We Are Not a Museum won the New York Book Festival award.

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Setu, April 2025