REINCARNATION
BY MEHUL BHAGAT
Emory University, ’18
2015 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors List
His parents hold him over
his brother’s grave, explain how
he is his brother born
again. It is the miracle
of rebirth, renaming, reclamation.
The day of his birth the mother is taken
in distress, gazing at her newborn
child. The mother
has named the son in the guise
of love, chosen to think of both sons, living
and dead in a single invocation:
Salvador. And in his portrait
Dalí has rendered his brother
a specter. Detailed in a cascade
of cherries, the dead Salvador is framed
as a sum of parts, composite of molecules
spelled out by light. In the mirage
the face emerges, beautiful
and threatening. In the right
corner of the piece
he bears the weight
of his name. Each day,
I sound out my name,
its interplay of letters, searching
between knowledge and grief,
for some inheritance—
perhaps to carry, like the nameless mother
some quotient of the dead.
SCENE FROM MARRIAGE, 1994
BY MEHUL BHAGAT
Emory University, ’18
2015 Adroit Prize for Poetry: Editors List
This is my mother before she became my mother.
Her body is flushed, laden with gold. She is dressed silent,
her white sari almost flesh—ageless. This is another
moment lifted from time. My mother’s hands are clasped—rooted
together as if deep in thought. We listen
to the smallness of the gesture. Something is alluded
here. The dialogue, the context, is lost, set beneath sheets
of color. My mother’s kohl-rimmed left eye
looks further than we can see—where one world meets
*
the other. Here, someone has pressed a finger
to the hollow of my mother’s cheek—made a thumbprint—the eye
of something darker. This is the place we linger.
Often we try and recreate the scene—
slide gold bangles onto her wrist, dab her forehead red. Who
knew the vermillion wouldn’t hold? The sheen
of the photograph has taken something from us, buried
what we didn’t know we possessed. How
we try, to imagine her rendered, for a single moment, unmarried.
