An Old Man and the Sea
the legend of Machilipatnam
Before the cyclones wiped out
Here was once the arch
Carved from a whale’s eye
And the old man that caught it
And the effusive voice of the sea
With its billows never tired
Of breaking the good old tidings
My thought boats in and out of now,
For an intuition of the legend of,
An Old man and the Sea:
How, to leave a legacy behind,
For his grandsons, he baited
That gargantuan Machili;
Floating that oil drum lamp,
Drawing it ashore
With its flickering temptation;
A death that becomes
The name of our Patnam,
A history, and a truth
that lies here today
Like a pencil sketched marlin’s skeleton –
A trophy of defeat,
Stranger than an earnest fiction
This earth sands in the hands of time.
Today the hot winds winklessly lisp
Like those breakers to break the ice
And thaw the mummified truth
Slabbed under our frozen conscience.
Notes: The Hindi meaning of Machili is fish and Patnam is city.
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Sreekanth Kopuri, Ph.D. is an Indian poet from Machilipatnam. He is the Current poetry editor for The AutoEthnographer Journal Florida, and was a Professor of English at Dravidian University. He is a pushcart nominee for 2023. He recited his poetry in Oxford, John Hopkins, Heinrich Heine, Caen, Banja Luka, and many. His poems appeared in Two Thirds North, Arkansas Review, San Antonio Review, Tulsa Review, Expanded FieldPlants & Poetry, Oddball Magazine, to mention a few. His book Poems of the Void won the Golden Book of the year 2022. Kopuri lives with his mother in Machilipatnam. He may be reached at sreekanthkopuri@gmail.com.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 