Smitha Sehgal’s Two Poems

Smitha Sehgal is a much-published poet. Her poems speak volumes of her eye for precision and detail underlined with a sensitivity that echoes the joys and pains inherent in her surroundings. She engages with the everyday world rendering it extraordinary by weaving synesthetic images that evoke beauty and touch a chord with the reader. In poems like ‘Sunshine’ she describes a frail woman, cleaning a house, who inhabits all our homes but it takes the likes of Sehgal to write of them. The social reality of hunger and darkness is expressed in the image of a ‘dark hole in the sun’.

1) Plucking Jackfruit

plucking jackfruit

is a vexing task right after the monsoon,

you might as well make use of the summer,

plunge into the day,

nudge the fruit on its nape,

give a gentle push with a twisted rod

sourced from the blacksmith,

if he isn’t helpful,

you may knock at the gardener’s,

borrow a bamboo reed,

nice and long, the kind used

for trellis

firmly tie a shorter stick

on one end with coir

that the whole device resembles a catapult

with a long handle,

choose a safe angle

that when the spiked fruit falls with a thud

it doesn’t land on your head.

now for those heavier jackfruits,

they were brought down by the tree climber,

negotiating the fire-ants

and nesting crows

and more often meditated midway on the trunk,

and if the tree branched over a busy high way

you had to pacify the honking cars

and school bus and hold your breath

on the edge of the earth

when the sun peaks split open

the fruit, the smell bursts, floods your lungs

with the memory of first kiss

or the thin film of placenta on the newly birthed calf,

the flesh of yellow bulbs hold sunlight,

draped in the sticky sap

the seeds soaked and scraped

the slow boil of lentil,

a sprinkle of drumstick leaves

on a heap of steaming white rice.

2) Sunshine

The little woman sweeps away

the fine dust breathing inside my home

the tables, chairs, mats, books, curios.

Thin fingers clutch a mop cloth, thin wrist,

red bangles tinkle,

polishing brass,

the house now bearable.

Once in a while, absent minded,

I ask her about her village.

She sits down on her haunches,

draped in the burnt red of hibiscus,

blowing into a brimming saucer

talks about the river flowing by her home,

the women bathing, washing clothes

the fresh catch of fish,

faraway sea. The air smells of salted cod.

A home in the hole of the sun

which she must breathe

once in the turn of a year.

Two and a half days of train journey

and rest by foot amidst paddy fields

and coconut groves.

Someone else’s.

There is a harvest song in the air,

but mostly,

there is only a dark hole in the sun

and hunger

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Smitha Sehgal is a legal professional and a bilingual poet who writes in English and Malayalam.

Her poems, fiction and book reviews have featured in contemporary literary publications as Reading Hour, Brown Critique, Kritya, Muse India, The Wagon Magazine, Usawa Literary Review, Parcham, Madras Courier, Water Video Mag, EKL Review, The Criterion, Kalakaumudi, Samakalika Malayalam, Kalapoorna, ShadowKraft, Da Cheung (Korean Literary Journal) Ink Sweat & Tears, Tiger Moth Review, Almost Island, Acropolis Journal, Gone Lawn Journal and anthologies including “40 Under 40: An Anthology of Post-Globalisation Poetry”, “Witness -Red River Book of Poetry of Dissent.”

Her first collection of poems ‘How Women Become Poems in Malabar’ (Red River, India) has been released recently. Her poems have been nominated as Best of the Net by three prestigious journals in 2023 (The Indianapolis Review, Marrow Magazine & The Chaotic Merge Magazine).

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