My Mother at Sixty-six
about the poet
Kamala Das (1934-2009) was born in Malabar, Kerala. She is recognised as one of India’s foremost poets. Her works are known for their originality, versatility and the indigenous flavour of the soil. Kamala Das has published many novels and short stories in English and Malayalam under the name ‘Madhavikutty’. Some of her works in English include the novel Alphabet of Lust (1977), a collection of short stories padmavati the Harlot and Other stories (1992). in addition to five books of poetry. She is a sensitive writer who captures the complex subleties of human relationships in lyrical idiom, My Mother at Sixty-six is an example.
Before you read
Ageing is natural process: Have you ever thought what our elderly parents expect from us?
Driving from my parent’s
home to Cochin last friday
morning, I saw my mother,
beside me,
doze, open mouthed, her face
ashen like that
of a corpse and realised with
pain
that she was as old as she
looked but soon
put that thought away, and
looked out at Young
Trees sprinting, the merry children spilling
out their homes , but after the airport’s
security check, standing a few yards
away, I looked again at her, wan,
pale
as a later winter’s moon and felt that
old
familiar ache, my childhood’s fear,
but all I said was , see you soon,
Amma,
all I did was smile and
smile......
An Elementary School Classroom In A Slum
About the poet
Stephen Spender (1909 - 1995) was an English poet and an essayist. He left University College, Oxford without taking a degree and went to Berlin in 1930. Spender took a keen interest in politics and declared himself to be a socialist and pacifist. Books by Spender Include Poems of Dedication, The Edge of the Modern and an autobiography, World Within World. In, Elementary School Classroom In a Slum, he has Concentrated on themes of social injustice and class inequalities.
Before you read
have you ever visited or seen an elementary school in a slum?
What does it look like?
Far far from gusty waves these children's faces Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor: The tall girl with her weighed - down head. The paper-seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease, His lesson, from his desk . At back of the dim class One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream, Of squirrel's game, in tree room, other than this.
On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head, Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities, Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open - handed map Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these Children, these windows, not this map, their world, Where all their future's painted with a fog, A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky Far far from rivers, capes and stars of words.
Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example, With ships and and love tempting them to steal--For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. All of their time and space are foggy slum So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.
Unless, governor, inspector, visitor, This map becomes their window and these windows That shut upon their lives like catacombs, break O break open till they break the town And show the children to green fields, and make their world Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues Run naked into books the language is the sun.
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