On Books Left Behind in my Office and a Grandfather
By K. Srilata
I have lost entire bookshelves these lockdowned weeks.
Odes, elegies, lyrics,
entire ways to sing experience –
I have lost them all.
I have lost Paradise Lost,
lost hell and heaven,
lost stories, lost all the many ways to tell them,
lost the gentle lean of book spines like giraffe necks,
lost the heady mix up of categories -
Joe Sacco’s Palestine resting beside Ramanujan’s Poems of Love and War,
lost the books I teach,
the ones I haven’t taught in a while,
lost the books I have lost to my students
marked by wistful spaces between books not yet lost,
lost the way light has of shining on certain books, depending,
lost the lazy dust that lies on others not visited in years,
lost the coy silverfish that dart from between
my grandfather’s Palgrave’s Golden Treasury,
his name carefully calligraphed on the first page –
he was a careful man.
And I have gone and lost him, all over again, these past lockdowned weeks.
K.Srilata is a poet, writer and Professor of English at IIT Madras. She was a writer in residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland, Yeonhui Art Space, Seoul and Sangam house. Srilata has five collections of poetry, the latest of which, ‘The Unmistakable Presence of Absent Humans’, was published by Poetrywala in 2019.
