Two Poems by Medha Singh

Another Life

I’m writing love on a serviette
as mourners gather on a mound
for the disgraced dead, still
in grave-clothes underfoot—
suddenly, slow pianos      sing
in air, the shifting earth
moving its cadavers to an ache
in the ocean. Here they are, rakes reborn
as willows contorted into pains
they don’t recognize. Bad men become trees.
The earth forgives them, as do I. They begin
to give. The wicked also dream
of love. They know darkness overhead
means night before & night behind, yet drops
of light have shot through this earth’s evening;
overhead, gingkoes have flared
against sun. Evening over tarmac, evening
beneath lorries, where dogs huddle
for warmth and for miles on end
the quiet noise of town, & at the end
of the last  mile, me, pouring this syrup
on a napkin. Things I can’t say yet:
Oh, pianos. Oh, love. How we begin
to open, under black water.

Lunch, Boat

The church on distant ground, its cross like a spinning top
& the kitchen at the restaurant, ripe with hot butter sizzling
through fresh ramsons. A staghorn knife quartered the after
-noon. At the table on the prow, gleaming fish lay inside
crushed ice— such liquid music before the food’s arrival, swish
and slosh, all that’s born in water. Quelles textures, sitting
in the narrowing light, our chests taut with fear: political views,
all fissured and chivvied. Don’t speak to me of values,
they take time to marinate, cook. What we mistook for love,
really just refractions: it was over then. Borrowed light mirrored
in droplets at once prism and sphere. In their sheen I saw
reflections of lost friends, the same lumens darting
through us, that once blighted Saturn’s petroleum oceans
& lay on the granular snouts of foals tethered to a cart
in a sunlit field.

Medha Singh is a poet, editor, and translator based in Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in The Robert Graves Review, 3:AM, Hotel, Firmament, and Interpret among others. She is the author of Ecdysis (2017, Mumbai) and a work of translation from the French, I Will Bring My Time: Love Letters by S.H. Raza (Vadehra Art, 2020). Singh has taken her master's degree in Creative Writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has been anthologised in Singing in the Dark (Penguin, 2020), The Gollancz Book of South Asian Science Fiction (Hachette, 2021), Contemporary Indian Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi, 2020), Best Indian Poetry 2018 (RLFPA editions), Divining Dante (Recent Work Press, 2021), Future Library: Contemporary Indian Writing (Red Hen Press, 2022), Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Penguin Random House, 2022), and The Best Asian Poetry (Kitaab, 2022). Her work has been translated into Hindi, Spanish, and French. Her interviews have appeared on the websites of The Pablo Neruda Foundation, Chile; NERObooks, Boston; POV, Denmark; Queen Mob's Teahouse, London; and JCAM, Massachusetts. She was nominated for the TFA awards (India) in 2019 and 2020. She is the winner of the New Writers Award (Scottish Book Trust), 2023. She edits London-based literary journal Berfrois and reads poetry for Sepia Journal.