From Lockdown Garden

By ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTRA

Left untrained,
the bitter melon’s taken over
the mulberry, dusting it

with small yellow flowers. 
The females will shrivel,
then elongate with the goodness

of bitterness. The males
will drop by the wayside
no sooner than they’re touched.

Had they wings, 
they’d have turned 
into butterflies and joined 

the fantail-flycatcher
making figures of eight
at the other end of the garden. 

*

It’s quiet on Sunday afternoons,
a time to watch pigeons walk across
the street as though they were crossing 

the sky. The mango trees bordering the lawn
were planted the year psephology 
came to India, but the golden rain sapling 

planted last month is catching up,
putting out new leaves
the colour of buried copper. 

*

Crushed by the cluster fig’s lopped branch,
the hophead Philippine violet didn’t recover.
But in an unvisited corner of the garden where the marijuana’s
invasive and dead wood rots, a new one’s come up.
It’s still young with flexible spikes,
and already looks to escape
from hazardous garden to safe bushland.

*

Its guavas inedible
and the trunk a broken stick
on which it leans, it holds fast
to its one branch 
as I do to my father
who planted the sapling,
his photograph fading on the wall 
along with the Fifties hairstyle.

*

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s books include Songs of Kabir, Selected Poems and Translations, and Collected Poems. Ghalib, A Diary: Delhi 1857–58, a chapbook, is to be published by New Walk Editions in spring 2022. He lives in Dehradun, India.

[Purchase Issue 23 here.]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

From Lockdown Garden

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.