Satya Dash

Ornamental Design

"You have to play like you don't care, but you have to care a lot”
                                   ―Grant Elliott after playing a match winning knock
                in the Cricket World Cup Semifinal, New Zealand v South Africa, 2015

Such was my composure in an orchard full of arrows
once, someone hid behind me thinking I was a tree.
Eventually my appetite for oxygen gave me away.
It still remains a fond memory. Now I see great sportsmen
on TV deliver under extreme pressure of expectation
& wonder if they somehow found that place where you
care so fine that your muscles move like the sky does
during rain. Is that the key to performance? I want
to know where I can find that thing called sangfroid.
Even in love, I find my neck stooping & mouth
frothing if I’m too earnest. Which is such a shame
really. What I’m saying is ―why is everything such
a game of contradictions, why are some nights
too humid to cry myself to sleep. Water in the air
& suddenly no water in my eyes. Ugh. I’ve been told
I’m a noisy eater. Time to time, the decibels residing
in my countless orifices prick me too, injecting
garden varieties of sadness. Forgive me when I say ―
one major benefit  of sadness is intelligence. I mean,
just look at how reverberations of a body wave
through time. Spooned up by other desirous
bodies within radius. Then yawned into countless
moons for their new nights. I can tell you
even when the British left this country, the smatterings
of language they left behind, we used as salt ―first
on our bruises, then in our food. To be honest,
I wouldn’t be writing this poem otherwise. In a
language that feels so utterly mine because now
I even fantasize in it. Through twenty eight years of being
vigorously pinned to days & nights, I now realize
this is all by design. The beasts in us shall smash up
against each other in fury & accident. That’s all right,
even the planets roughed up each other at the start.
Bodies will rise to silence, lick their fountain wounds.
After a deciduous length of years, shake hands. But
here’s the catch ―you won’t act as if you know
even though you do. This is by design too. Look, I know
you stole a glance at me glancing at you. In your book,
keep me young or keep me old. Up to you.
But I’m interested in knowing if you kept me
gentle. With a little scope for venom.

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Satya Dash's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passages North, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Florida Review, Pidgeonholes, Glass Poetry, Prelude, and others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. His work has been twice nominated for the Orison Anthology. He spent his early years in Odisha, India and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at : @satya043