Vinod Kumar Shukla
Translated from the Hindi by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
That man put on a new woolen coat and went away like a thought.
In rubber flip-flops I struggled behind.
The time was six in the morning, the time of hand-me-downs, and it was freezing cold.
Six in the morning was like six in the morning.
There was a man standing under a tree.
In the mist it looked like he was standing inside his own blurred shape.
The blurred tree looked exactly like a tree.
To its right was a blurred horse of inferior stock,
Looking like a horse of inferior stock.
The horse was hungry, the mist like a grassy field to him.
There were other houses, trees, roads, but no other horse.
There was only one horse. I wasn't that horse,
But my breath, when I panted, was indistinguishable from the mist.
If the man standing at that one spot under the tree was the master,
Then to him I was a horse at a gallop, horseshoes nailed to my boot soles.
from the book FUTURE LIBRARY: CONTEMPORARY INDIAN WRITING / Red Hen Press
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While he diverts our attention with metaphor and linguistic play, Shukla introduces his moral vision. "There was only one horse. I wasn't that horse," protests the speaker of the poem, the man in rubber flip-flops. But in the eyes of the boss, he is "a horse at a gallop, horseshoes nailed to [his] boot soles." The working man has changed places with the workhorse. The boss remains what he is, an unattainable idea of wealth, someone snug in the woollen coat of his thoughts.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on "'That man put on a new woolen coat and went away like a thought'"
Cover of Marjorie Welish’s A Complex Sentence
"A Complex Sentence about Marjorie Welish's A Complex Sentence"

"Marjorie Welish's A Complex Sentence is a book about another book (and a few other books, too); if The Cantos are a house of mirrors, then Welish's latest effort is another house built around that house—something of an antiexegesis, an entombment—; just as Pound reinvents history, Welish implies that we must reinvent the act of reading in order to read A Complex Sentence: if we are 'Reading otherwise. / Reading sometimes. / Not reading.'"

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Cover of Billy-Ray Belcourt's book, This Wound is a World
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Billy-Ray Belcourt (Driftpile Cree Nation, Alberta) on Ecopoetry Now 

"On the coast of Lesser Slave Lake, some of the Canadian government's most brutal forms of colonial oppression played out. I wonder what it means for a lake to be witness to all of it. In a way, that trauma is inscribed in the lake's ontological fabric. But, more importantly, I see the lake as proof of my people's indomitability. The lake precedes the political project of Alberta, of Canada; it precedes the concept of the settler state. The lake has been and continues to be a locus of Cree livability."
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