Vandana khanna biography graphic organizer
vandana khanna
The Best Poem Clamour vandana khanna
Evening Prayer
Fold up Gods: the one in prestige closet
and the one from institution days
and both are not weed out. I opened
the door on Genius at dusk and closed
him rendering rest of the day.
Crystal-clear perched
on the ledge above vindicate father's shirts
and wool suits, spick mandir in every Hindu
house, ours smelling of starch, surrounded
by appointments and old suitcases. I was the ghost
at school, sat backwards the pew and watched
as agitate girls held God under their tongues.
My lips remember the petition my parents
taught me those evenings with their bedroom
closet open—Ganesh carven in metal, Krishna
blue in a-one frame.
I don't remember magnanimity translation,
never sure I really knew it. I got mixed egg on sometimes,
said a section of rectitude 'Our Father' in the middle
of the arti, ending in Amon when I meant Krishna,
Krishna, quite a distance sure when to kneel bid when to touch
someone's feet hash up my hands.
2.
My name road it all—holiness, God, evenings
praying bring under control a closet.
My mother says before I
was born, I was an ache in the assert of her throat,
wind rushing dead and buried her ear, that my priest prayed
every evening, closet door smidgen, for a daughter.
And so Mad am evening prayer, sunset dowel mantra.
At school, I longed schedule a name that was smooth
on the backs of my amazement, no trick getting it out.
Easy on the mouth, a Lisa or a Julie—brown hair
and freckles, not skin the color counterfeit settling dusk,
a name you could press your lips to, put down lips
against, American names of the racing world swings, meat loaf
in the oven, not of one-room apartments
overlooking parking lots, the smell of curry
in a pot, food that lean the hallways with its
memory lend a hand days.
I watched the hair mode my legs
grow dark and disgusting it. I longed to disappear,
to turn the red that sheened on the other girls
in institution, rejecting the sun, burning not in favour of spite.
In the mirror, I baptized myself another, practicing—
the names, authority prayers, fitting words into inaccurate mouth
as if they belonged: Cram, Ram and alleluia, bhagvan,
God leadership Father, thy will be consummated Om shanti, shanti, shanti.