March 17, 2024

Tishani Doshi

KILL THEM IN THE MORNING

I’m trying to find where it says,
If your enemy comes to slay you at night,
kill them in the morning. What happens
in the hours of waiting? Do you sing
to one another across the trenches,
stargaze from casements, then set off
to duel at first light? What is it about the sun
rising that’s so self-righteous? The firstness,
the lightness? There’s an allegory somewhere
about a girl holding scissors encircled by soldiers
with guns. Don’t we know that the dragging
from trains takes place after dark, that wars
always happen offstage until they’re not? Summer
is almost upon us, romantic and lonely. I know,
I know, no tightrope-walking allowed between our house
and the neighbour’s. Haven’t you dreamed
of disappearing for a day, then returning
to life, triumphant? Wouldn’t you want
to know who missed you, who rejoiced?
The idea that there are no innocent people.
What colour would you call this hair
under the rubble? My enemy’s enemy
is an Ottoman couch. But we’re here now,
those of us alive, standing on the beach,
facing the rosy dawn—how it slip slaps us
into forgiveness, how we turn the other cheek.
 

from Poets Respond
March 17, 2024

__________

Tishani Doshi: “Not sure there are any explanations. How must we be alone, how must we be together?” (web)

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February 22, 2022

Tishani Doshi

MANAGEMENT CHANGES RULES ABOUT THE DRESS CODE

We are always stepping into the same river
expecting the water to feel nice. Management
decides what temperature to keep things.
Whether jeans will continue to be seductive
this season, whether kaftans will be banished
overnight. Management admits, the rules
can be confusing: Cover your breasts! Uncover
them! Jump into the fire! Desist! Management
is doing this to free us from oppression.
Elsewhere, management puts up signs in bars:
Bodycons and stilettos, welcome!

I like that long ago story of the exiled warriors
in the forest who make garlands of flowers
for one another. All that formidable male floral
talent. How one of the warriors is a monkey—
son of the sun, he of the beautiful neck. I can deal
with the passive aggressiveness of drawing
a circle of safety around a house and saying,
Feel free to cross over, but only for cute
animals! But to be swallowed by the earth
in a chastity test? I’d like that less.
What use is being pure if you’re dead?

Management can’t understand why
there’s such resistance to bring your dots
to the polka day, to pack away your hijab
day. They’ve sent in a parade to convince us.
Listen to the drums. It’s twirl your saffron
scarves day. The choreography’s a bit stilted
but they’ll soon deliver—rear lat spread, side chest,
bicep FLEX—like a tease of menacing strippers.
I can’t help thinking about those warrior brothers
in the forest. Tender men with bows and arrows.
What they’d make of this lone heroine—

daughter of community, deal of the day, raising
her fist in defiance. Are we really as far gone
as we think, or is the distance something
we imagine? Management needs new illusions
if we’re to keep faith in the narrowing rivers.
We’re no longer okay to be born in a box
and left in a field. Even the most docile of furrows
can develop a spleen. Management should know
there are vines in the forest that can strangle their hosts
with the tiniest bell-shaped flowers. That spring,
when it arrives, is bedecked with revolutions.

from Poets Respond
February 20, 2022

__________

Tishani Doshi: “This week I read how Muslim Indian women in the state of Karnataka were being denied entry to college because they were wearing hijabs. How they were being instructed to follow the university ‘dress code’ which previously seemed to have had no problem with the hijab. And I watched in awe, the video of one brave woman who stood up to a mob of right-wing Hindu hecklers. Meanwhile, in Surrey, UK, an upscale restaurant put out a dress code for female customers to wear sexy heels and bodycon dresses. In the midst of all this, I happened to see a beautiful folio from the Ramayana from the 1700s of the warrior Lakshmana picking elephant flowers to make a garland for Sugriva and even though a fair bit of that epic is about paternalistic protecting and control, I thought how tender. How far.” (web)

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November 2, 2021

Tishani Doshi

JEFF BEZOS GOES TO SPACE AND BECOMES A BHAKTI POET

“I! I! A terrible thing.
Run from it if you can.”
—Kabir

We must believe Jeff bows down
in all that darkness. That his transformation
occurs the way a new star burns out
of the cloudy egg that has sheltered it.
For so long, they have been trying to tell
him, Journey within, in order to slay
your inner deer. The city of your body
is your own green garden. Like all men
who believe they have the right to go on
forever, Jeff thought the word emperor
came from empyrean. He wanted
to get there first. He had never experienced
the discomfort of being a guest too long
in someone’s home. What Jeff saw,
he beheld and owned. From above
he sees there will never be enough time.
We can only survive by closing the gaps—
these globs of dust around us, the whole
cosmic past—an inferno, still simmering
out there on the horizon. Waves rise
through his body, and he gets it now,
he really gets it. The body is as boundless
as the universe. Every window inside him
opens. Look how our planet gleams
like the bud of a rare blue lotus—oh!
It’s why bliss is always described
as a kind of burning. We begin and end
with fire. Jeff, listen, if you can.
It’s not too late. We are aglow,
and the future is coming for us.

from Poets Respond
November 2, 2021

__________

Tishani Doshi: “Jeff Bezos announced this week that his commercial space station venture ‘Orbital Reef’ will offer among other things an ‘optimal location for film-making in microgravity’ as well as a space hotel. According to this article, ‘The station will have large Earth-facing windows so that space tourists can take in the beauty of our planet and experience the thrill of weightlessness in complete comfort …’ The Bhakti poets knew a thing or two about connecting with the cosmos without actually relocating there, so I suppose this poem is wishful thinking.” (web)

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October 18, 2021

Tishani Doshi

THE COMEBACK OF SPEEDOS

I’ll keep this brief. I remember the shock of Mr. G’s tiger-striped trunks 
at the Madras Gymkhana Club. Nothing to conceal, everything to 
declare, like a Mills & Boon hero. Shiver of ball and sack, acres
of hairy scrub. We could not imagine such freedom for
ourselves. To slice through chlorinated depths
with a little basket of dim sum on display.
We were girls. To open our legs
was treason. We held
our breath.

from Rattle #73, Fall 2021
Tribute to Indian Poets

__________

Tishani Doshi (from the conversation in this issue): “There’s something marvelous about the conciseness and smallness of poems. I love that they are small and yet very big, and that you can spend time with one poem and it can expand so much in you. There’s something about the distillation of the form that is allowed to say things in a way that we can’t do with other arts. There’s something mysterious about it. Nobody is able to define exactly what a poem is; nobody’s able to say what makes a poem good or not—these are still questions that are out for debate, and, in a way, I think they’re meaningless. If a poem touches you or moves you, it has the possibility of transformation, and I’m really interested in that. Of course, novels can do that, and dance is capable of those transformative moments, but a poem for me also reaches back to a tradition of orality, the spoken word, of putting something into existence just by speaking it, by naming it. There’s something ancient in that. There’s something powerful about incantation. I’m less interested in breaking down a poem than in the sense of a poem just washing over you and changing you somehow.” (web)

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October 15, 2021

Tishani Doshi

ROTTEN GRIEF

This morning I misread Tantrism for Tourism and it’s been downhill 
ever since. Elephants are dying in the Okavango Delta and no one 
knows why. A man I love crumples into himself on a railway 
platform away from home. My sister calls to tell me about 
her aged cat, who keeps collapsing, then rising to roam
the house in wobbly confusion. It is all falling, falling.
A poet on the internet talks about a Jewish legend,
where we are given tears in compensation for
death. I would cry about the perfectness of it
except I’m incapable. My ophthalmologist   
has made a diagnosis of dry eye so I
must buy my tears in a pharmacy.
I think of what this is doing to
all the rotten grief inside me—
unable to create salt bathing
pools to fire up my wounds,
this body powered by 
breath, dragging its
legs through 
the vast 
summers
that have 
lost their will to 
transform me. All 
the unknowing we 
must accept and fold
like silk pocket-hankies
pressed against our chests. 
The theory of spanda in 
Tantra advises you to live 
within the heart. I’m a tourist 
here, so bear with me, but imagine 
a universe vibrated into being. All things 
made and unmade by a host of small movements, 
my favourite being matsyodari —throb of fish when 
out of water. Just the word throb, you understand, hints 
at longing, but also distress, and suddenly, language opens. 
All the etymologies I used to think were useless in the arena 
of bereavement are echoing over the great plains of beige carpet, 
saying, We interrupt your weeping to tell you the world is real, rejoice!
The elephants in the Okavango are keeling over like ships. No one 
can say why. A die-off sounds worryingly like a bake-off but 
without the final prize. At night I squeeze drops into my
eyes, whispering the magic words, Replenish, ducts, 
replenish. If you play elephants the voices of their
dead, they’ll go mad for days, searching for 
their beloveds. To fall is never an action 
in slow motion. The snap of elastic 
in your pants, going going gone
Belief caving in like a bridge. 
My heart, your heart, the 
elephants’—here’s a 
crazy thought—
what if they’re
dying of
grief?

from Rattle #73, Fall 2021
Tribute to Indian Poets

__________

Tishani Doshi (from the conversation in this issue): “There’s something marvelous about the conciseness and smallness of poems. I love that they are small and yet very big, and that you can spend time with one poem and it can expand so much in you. There’s something about the distillation of the form that is allowed to say things in a way that we can’t do with other arts. There’s something mysterious about it. Nobody is able to define exactly what a poem is; nobody’s able to say what makes a poem good or not—these are still questions that are out for debate, and, in a way, I think they’re meaningless. If a poem touches you or moves you, it has the possibility of transformation, and I’m really interested in that. Of course, novels can do that, and dance is capable of those transformative moments, but a poem for me also reaches back to a tradition of orality, the spoken word, of putting something into existence just by speaking it, by naming it. There’s something ancient in that. There’s something powerful about incantation. I’m less interested in breaking down a poem than in the sense of a poem just washing over you and changing you somehow.” (web)

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May 26, 2020

Tishani Doshi

AFTER A SHOOTING IN A MATERNITY CLINIC IN KABUL

No one forgets there’s a war going on,
but there are moments you could be forgiven
for believing the city is still an orchard,
a place where you could make a thing grow.
There is always a pile of rubble from which
some desperate person struggles to rise,
while another person wraps a shawl
around their shoulders and roasts
marshmallows over a fire.
This is not that.
This is not bomb dropping from sky,
human shield, hostages in a stream, child
picking up toy that explodes in her hands—
although there’s always that—hope is a booby trap.
This is the house you were brought to after crossing
a river, leaving the mountains and burnt fields
behind. A place of safety where you
could be alone with your own
startling power.
Not Why were you out? And why
wasn’t your face covered? And who told you
to climb into that rickshaw? But here, prepare
for this most ordinary thing, a birth. And this is not
to ask what it means to never see someone again,
but to ask what it means not to make it past
the first checkpoint of your mother’s gates.
Never mind all the wild places
outside—
the mud-brick villages, the valleys and harvests
and glasses of green tea. Or even to say, I am here
to claim the child of Suraya, because you know
this to be impossible. Even if you could bring a man
to recover your sister’s corpse and the newborn,
where do you go from here? You still have
to consider the bodies, the bullet-ridden
walls, still have to climb up to the small
window of this house and take in
the panorama.
See—it is raining outside and men weep
for their wives, and perhaps the entire world
is an orchard that has detonated its crimson fruits,
its pomegranates and poppies and tart mulberries
to wash these floors red, and those of us who stand
outside this house know that nothing will flourish
here again. Like crowds who gather
for an execution, we can only ask,
what does it mean to be born
in a graveyard, to enter
the world, saying,
oh thief, oh life.

from Poets Respond
May 26, 2020

__________

Tishani Doshi: “We are going through all kinds of horror with corona but this is a different kind of horror.”

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April 19, 2020

Tishani Doshi

TREE OF LIFE

“Bengal men self-quarantine on tree to keep others safe”
—Hindustan Times

It could be romantic to sleep in a tree
with all the sounds of the forest around—
insect cacophony, elephants in musth.
I have always loved the word rut. A seasonal
glut. The opposite of looking through
a window to a never-ending view of wives
washing dishes in the sink—Simone
de Beauvoir’s idea of the domestic abyss.
But reader, she had silk curtains and chandeliers.
She had multiple lovers and appointments
with Sartre in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
It is dangerous to romanticize anyone’s life,
especially low to purge the nobility of the poor,
so let me not say how much I cried watching
Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, especially the part
with the kids running through fields of kash
to watch the train of modernity pass.
More poignant if you know the director’s wife
had to pawn her jewels for the film to be made.
The goodness of some women—
they almost levitate, like the girl in the film,
child of the forest, how she picks thorns from her feet
like stones from rice. And the crone, how I love
the crone. How all this sadness builds like a raga
to bring on rain, which the girl rushes into of course—
ripples of water lilies, darting bugs. How all this joy
leads to death. There are no spare rooms
is the point. In the film, or in real life.
There are no spare rooms so these men
who’ve returned from the city are put in a tree
to quarantine, a tree that strangles its hosts
as it walks. Munificent, shade-giving banyan
that throws down roots as trunks,
in whose leaves God Krishna resides. Krishna,
who talked good game about the temporality
of the body, while so enjoying the body, understood
the material world as one big inverted banyan.
But as we’re stuck in this reflection, why not
enjoy the fruits, why not jump from branch to branch
like a bird? Which these men do, I suppose, stationed
as they are. Their good wives leave supplies at the base—
rice and oil, cooking implements. It goes like this
for days, this story of seven men in a tree, living
through a 21st century pandemic. Men who say
they’re happy not to pass on any bad city virus.
And because the news is so full of counterfeits
and horrors, can we for once not be sceptics?
Forget that the tree is moving, that one day
its phantom limbs will tap against our door.
Until then, can’t we stand by our windows
and stare at all the desolation and sweetness?
Can’t we adore the convoluted roots
of our attachments? How they complete
us. My god, how this living is a hymn.

from Poets Respond
April 19, 2020

__________

Tishani Doshi: “Seven migrant men in India were made to quarantine in a tree when they made the long journey back from the city to their village because their houses have no extra rooms. They seemed quite cheerful about it.” (web)

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