Embedded Files
Urur
The river’s hair thinned
around what was once an islet,
the estuary a corpse’s frothing mouth
and across
from the thickets of rising flats
pressing down the marsh’s diaphragm,
the estate — bringer of the city
to the place of turtles; forest, walled still,
spilling barbed wire-bougainvillea curlicues.
Long scattered is the Rosicrucian mist
dense as a brain over dead banyans,
over croquet courts bequeathed to weeds,
sapped and emptied the astral elements
from the philological air, gone
the Quaker tycoons, the levitating Freemasons,
the Isis devotees and their moist deciduous dithyrambs:
refugees of western civilization
fresh from a season at Tolstoy farm.
This the shore where, a century ago
Iyothee Thassar saw in the salt dark wood
of the fishermen’s faces, carved
by the nine winds, the strict compassion
of the Buddhist ruins
he restored in his dreams.
Unchanged the faces, unchanged the boats
in the light of whose plying motion
the horizon can still be measured.
They were here
before the estate, before the city,
before the lights that hatchling turtles
stray toward mistaking for the moon,
before the gods.
Here I begin
in broken monsoon’s midst
a voice among the stars obscured
by smoke of shopfront lights,
a choked sun behind a night of wires
in the season of the fishing ban
this song
whose score
is sand’s cuneiform creases,
that breaks back together burial urns
stuck in the ribcage of the riverbed
waving
its crows of protest,
its egrets of surrender
over the blue, ash-fertilized desert
as the nets lie seething like restless snakes
and the smell of burning kerosene uncoils
from the piled supplications of dry leaves
and in the thatched shade an
interminable rummy, with no bets, proceeds.
Song, parched throat of the wind,
hollow dolak shell outside the house
half built for eight years now.
Ellaiamman
Black stone in
throats unknown
to song
tearing at
net’s coir
muscle fibre
each day
the sea spits you out
like a thought it
couldn’t hold
though we tried
to throw you back
Ellaiamma we
took you ashore
set you on the sand
You bleached like
tobacco in the light
a jasmine colored tern
perched atop you
quiet and very still
at night you wailed
like certain trees
women from the forest
sat around you
staring at the sun with all white eyes
singing with hooks thru their jaws
Ellaiamman Lullaby
pale body
winter leaf
swim to me
on waves of sleep
heavy boat
little oar
turn around
come to shore
sugarcane
in your name
chlorophyll
whispering
in ibises
of irises
the sardines
of the silver stars
will stitch a patchwork quilt
of scars
the daughter of
the sun and moon
is mother of
the land and sea
she sits between
waking and dream
her lap is salt
that sets your bones
her voice is ash
in your lungs
Dolak
On the skin of the nervous circuitry chewed by pornographic sandflies
On the skin of the sea scabbed with brown heroin scum
On the skin of love’s smoker’s cough
On the skin of the collapsed olive ridley lung
On the skin of the body of a thousand cataract eyes convulsed with molten wax
On the skin of wrinkled palmyra leather etched with exquisite torture of alphabets
he plays with the whips of his fingers
the diurnal migrations he
rips a hole in the sky enough for one of us
Song for the Net
Coir net
palmyra root stretched
fibre of our breath
stitched cradle
of our death
dreadlocks of
our hard
pleasures
hand of
our hands
don’t
come up
empty
Ashik Kahina is a poet and translator from Tamil. From Chennai, India, he is currently a PhD student in South Asian Studies at Harvard University. His work has appeared in Himal, Caravan, Prairie Schooner and Politics/Letter. The poems here are part of a sequence about the history, music and ecology of a fishing village called Urur Kuppam in Chennai/Madras, which was the site of the foundation of the Theosophical Society a century ago, and whose life has been intertwined with the Society’s.
Copyright © 2026 by Ashik Kahina, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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