Brown God’s Child

My Gods are forest dwellers,
their skin marked in burnt caramel
of the tropical sun.
On Amavasya nights
they feast on flame-torched cassava
and salted mackerel.

Sounds in my language
are symbols of dark and light,
half Sanskrit -half Dravidian,
colour of the sea, the smell of ripe paddy.
Don’t speak your tongue
they are blood clots, I am cautioned early on –

discordant as though pebbles rattling
in a box. Once, in the closed space
of an elevator, I turned into shifting sands.The girl beside me shuddered
as though the moon had wept
from empty madness. Your hair is a mass

of tangled roots and coiled secrets
of equinox, says Autumn. Come night,
I slough off my body and wander
into faithless verses.

Elegy

We dug a hole in the river’s heart
till our dreams inundated
the fishing village.

We burned the woods and clouds
till the landslides came rolling down
the roofs stacked high.

When it wasn’t enough,
we filled the ocean with sand,
now we became Gods.

We dusted the guilt off our backs
and flossed the moss lodged
in our mouths.

When it wasn’t enough,
we wrote an elegy for the Earth.

Harvest

I dye my hair in the thickening
monsoon cloud, crimson hibiscus
plucked from the lyrics bordering our
island, from the law of tides
countless leaves of wild mussanda
singing anthems in caverns of death,
raisins nesting dark spells of
still life, smell of a viper’s nest,
sunbeams falling on raised graves,
coconut oil smoked in indigo.

Bathing in the lotus pond
of my ruins, I waterbirth a moon,
my thighs splayed in faith,
chrysanthemums mourning.
Once my hips cracked beneath a void,
I limped like a broken
metaphor and scaled a stone wall,
a slow-burning roof, where they held
my poems, mouth full of honey,
hands tattooed in tears.

Walls cleaving the cold inside
my ventricles and time melting,
burying eyes like antedated coins,
trees falling back in the passage of years,
night hung like a garland
of light and how I harvested wounds,
each scar pickled in a jar in my kitchen
shelf of cinnamon and clove.

For Nilimda

My dear poet Nilim,
did you not know –
that God has been strangled
to death aeons ago in our village?
Ask river Brahmaputra,
he has guarded this secret
for a long while now.
Ask the breeze that comes beyond
Thumjang, the one that brushes past
your empty palm when you return
after a melting day,
ask them to tell you the truth.
In the dim lamps dying out
in the homes of the poor,
in the lines of pain on their face,
on the welts on their skin,
do you not hear the truth
in the blueness of the lake
in your poems, moon opening
a parasol of gold
in the branches of deodar,
do you not hear the truth?

Nakshatra

My great-grandmother counted her
twenty-seven daughters glowing
in the night sky. Chewing bitter
lotus roots, cartwheeling an insane

mind, eons ago she forsook the royal
throne and pearls. The serpent of desire
coiled lazily around her womb.
A coral reef grew on her earlobes

and fish swam in the empty
circle of her words. In her fist,
she held a circular amulet
of trust. Low swung on a hammock

beneath the fig tree, she speared
the mutiny of crows.
Don’t be a horse-head, she chided
the balladeer, who swung by noon,

opening a snuff box carved
from elephant tusk.
Her teardrops flooded the rivers
and she threw a new moon on

the Potter’s wheel each Amavasya.
Twilight bowed by her funeral
cot, in its prophecy, three
footprints of war shiver.

Smitha Sehgal was named one of the four featured poets of the 2025 Erbacce Poetry Prize for this collection.

Excerpted with permission from Brown God’s Child, Smitha Sehgal, Erbacce Press.

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