On Calling Mom to Mind
Also called by Yati Raj Nyaupane, Yati Raj Ajnabee is an enthusiast of letters who had to leave his parents, siblings and his homeland in the first year of his teens in 1992. He, who was born in Surey, a village in Southern Bhutan, has been living in Australia since September 2008. The chap is convinced that the language and literature of a community reflect how far it has reached in the road to civilization. According to his inner man, underlining promotion and preservation of culture, language and literature in a foreign country when an exodus leaves its indigenous locale for keeps, is so tough and testing that it turns out to be a knack if one does well in doing so. He can be contacted at yrajanabee@gmail.com.
Yati Raj Ajnabee
Adelaide, Australia
The monkeys
Fighting with one another for nuts
In the close-by woods would drop
The volume of their shrillest screeches
Down to nothing and hold their horses
When on the patio of your palm
You had me dance.
The moans and shrieks
Of my suffocation would sink into silence
When to the wall of your bosom
Broader than the stretch of the sky
You cuddled me.
In seventh heaven, I would be
Attaining that motherly warmth
When off my torso
You lugged the cold,
Slashed it into shreds and
Flung it into the beacon
Of twigs in the chill of the
Himalayan winter.
Lying being rocked
In the cot of your lap
I would soon hit the hay
When crooned you lullabies
Puffing out in a single sigh
The fatigue impregnated
In your trunk in the farm
By every fussy and randy day.
Kept hollowing out
With hitches
From the cradle to the grave
You kept hollowing out
That clumsy sterile earth
To fill the hole
Of my never-filling belly
But not at all craved you for
The dead early years
In the afternoon of your life
As I do.
As
Since the day I turned landless
I could not abide by your counsel:
Enrich the beauty of the world
By having life bloom in the soil;
I have my life
Planted in the pot of time.
Three-ply Kleenex facial tissue
Or
Pristine and pulpy sweetheart’s hankie
Can’t wipe away as much tears off my eyes
As does the edge
Of your soiled scarf
Or
The stroke of your toothed hands.
Had been hanging my heart
By a hook of catch-22 for ages.
I came to know now
Why in winter the Sun rises later.
Every morn has it to see you
To borrow warmth.
Never heard I jingle of the blues
In the vibrating throbs
Your ever chapped lips
Adept to spill zeal whistle.
Every time I thirst for a drink these days
In an attempt to sing those melodies
An image of the pitcher
Kept on the oven altar
Filled with the water you brought
Paying out hours
From Dewithan’s fount
Flickers somewhere around here
On the pond of the distant memories.