This time next year

‘Lockdown Garden’, a sequence from Of Least Concern by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

 Our house is the forest floor:
wood-panelled walls, a dead willow
with bracket fungi, empty shelves.
The place is ready,
waiting for our stuff
to arrive.

*

There are no greaters or lessers left.
There’s nothing left to classify,
nothing to multiply either.
The last coucal pair
was spotted in two gardens
separated by five degrees of latitude.

*

The sky black with clouds,
eight weeks into the rains,
there is in the garden
something white unfurling.
Loose of limb, a strappy body,
it has all the parts
of a spider lily: hands, feet, skin,
and black-rimmed eyes.

*

Was it your spoken
or your written voice I heard
as I bent to see where
the dumb nettle had
disappeared in the oxeyes?
Could you say it again?

*

The blue wishbone flower
I saw on the walk
was found growing under the mango tree
in the garden.
I hadn’t noticed it before
though it must’ve been there,
and will be there again, if the tree is there,
this time next year.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra is the author of some 20 books that include eight collections of poetry, two of essays, four works of translation, and several edited anthologies. He lives in Dehra Dun, India, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The sequence published here is from Of Least Concern, forthcoming from Shearsman in the UK and Literary Activism/Westland in India in late 2025.

Copyright © Arvind Krishna Mehrotra 2024.