Sabitha T.P.

Sabitha. T. P., born in 1975, is an academic, researcher, art critic, and poet. Her poems in Malayalam were first published when she was sixteen, in Keralakavita, edited by Ayyappa Panikkar. She has published her poems in Malayalam - in journals such as Mathrubhumi, Malayalam, Bhasha Poshini and Pacchakuthira - as well as in English - in The Little Magazine, Indian Literature and Malayalam Literary Survey. She has been doing research on early women’s journals in Malayalam (1886-1926) and on Company painting of landscapes. She has done book reviews for The Book Review and Indian Literature, apart from publishing her academic articles. She teaches in the department of English Literature in Hansraj College, North campus, Delhi University.

To Paul Celan1

Everyone over forty should be shot -

Wrote the poet in 19692.

The fifty-something Jewish poet

Heard it 1970 and

Resolved to drown himself in the Seine.

The Seine flowed on:

Fifty, thirty, sixty, forty, twenty…

Sweet Seine, flow softly3

Until I end my song,

Sweet Seine, sing softly,

Until my poem flows.

Softly, still softly,

Candles flickered:

Christ, Jehovah, Christ, Jehovah.

Whether new or old

Testaments will be testaments.

A soldier kept counting the Jew-heads

In some concentration camp:

Sixty, ten, thirty, fifty,

Seventy thousand and twenty one.

And you, you, you,

My later roses…

Softly, still softly,

Flowers bloomed in the cemetery:

Karl, Rosa, Paul.

Be it genocide or suicide

Death is death.

In a rain of black umbrellas

The priest chanted: Amen.

Outside death:

Fifty, ninety, forty…

Sweet Seine, flow softly,

Until I end my song.

Sweet Seine, sing loudly

Until my poem flares.

Death, scattered candlelight,

A molten Christ,

Roses, roses.