Poems by Arathy Ashok

1.

Lady Jesus

The doors are closed.

Even the windows.

No eyes blink.

I walk around the house once.

Twice. Then again.

I touch the walls to see

if they have broken.

A little hole, tiny,

hiding from my eye

through which I can look

into the darkness inside.

But nothing.

The home has become a house.

She has died, rotting on the cot,

she who smiled at me like a wild gypsy,

and told me to hide love letters under the green leaves.

Without her the jackfruit tree is bald.

The fisherman does not look in.

Here again,

I wait for the wind 

under a sky

to carry some smell that I missed

which would pour

water down my spine

closing the hole they drilled,

on my hand

my feet

my breast.

( from Lady Jesus and Other Poems, Author’s Press: New Delhi, 2018)

2.

Strike 

The farmers held

dead rats in their mouths,

wearing green loin clothes,

hiding what is left of their pride.

They sit in the capital city

waiting for some eyes to open,

they sit for days

unblinking

 in the cold.

Far away in distant lands

their crops have withered in the heat.

Their children look at open skies with empty stomachs.

Cattle stray among stubs of what was once green.

The women with water at their hips look into a far horizon for a dusty bus

that will return the men,

who left heir huts

 incomplete.

Arathy Ashok is a bilingual writer, poet and translator whose debut poetry collection Lady Jesus 

and Other Poems is described by Journal of Commonwealth Literature as “Resistance poetry 

with a sharp edge” (2019, Vol. 54(4) ). Most recently her poems have been included in The Kali 

Project and Witness: Indian Poets Define Dissent.(forthcoming.) Her recent work in translation 

is The Lost Heroine (Speaking Tiger Press, 2020).Her poetry installation titled Word Me Out was 

showcased at the fifth edition of the South Indian Poetry Carnival at Pattambi, Kerala. She was 

featured poet at The Blue Nib Magazine (Issue 37, Ireland) and at Poethead, Index of Women 

Poets, Ireland. . She writes short stories in Malayalam and English and recently a short story 

was included in the anthology One Surviving Story (icoe press, Australia). Her poems have been 

published in print and online and in national and international journals. Her articles have 

appeared in The Hindu Blink and elsewhere. Arathy is also moderator at the Indian English 

poetry collective The Quarantine Train.

Reviews  from Lady Jesus :

Arathy Asok's poems are political in the profoundest and most nuanced sense of the term. They 

stand witness to the injustices of the time, speak truth to power and address the collective 

destiny of the oppRressed in terms of caste, class and gender . They are the poems of a woman, 

free from dogma, interrogating the world of power and its manufactured hierarchies and 

exploring the possibility of love in a world where it is scarce and is seldom free from 

selfishness. Anguish and tenderness underlie their anger and frustration; dream and 

imagination illuminate their discontent and rebellion. And they speak to our innermost longings 

with a poet's quivering yet unmistakable voice.

K Satchidanandan

February 2018

 Introduction. Journal of Commonwealth Literature. (2019, Vol. 54(4)  Emma Lee reviews Lady Jesus and Other Poems. https://thebluenib.com/emma-lee-

reviews-lady-jesus-and-other-poems-by-arathy-asok/  A War on Social Evils. XS :Not a Poetry Review. 

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