Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

The fallen yellow leaves now oftener
flare red. Embers. Blown-up chilli-flakes.
The burning of the library at Jaffna.
Foreign dead about to break
the spell of here and now. Phantasms steal
into the peaceful lives we seem to have earned,
telling tales about what happened
to them, not us, and in a tongue I never learned.
This is my garden, my spade of blood meal
and from our kitchen the time-travelling smell
of chicken curry floats to Walden Pond.

—A swooping cardinal like a struck match.
Above the fence mosquitoes eddy
like opinion, crazed by a patch
of red-pink light into giddy
scribbling on the air. There is no need
to be ashamed. I see you there and keep
alive the thought of meeting one day
brightly after the next. Black mustard seed
thrums in the sauce, the sky falls asleep;
where feelings come from or may leap
across and through and to no one can say.

Tsunami-hit, shoved over at a tilt,
they’ve left the bashed old kovil’s god-thronged tower
standing, tallish, beyond the new one built
to face, this time, becalm, the ocean’s power…
Our autumn clouds are a far-quarried rubble
to which the changing light does spicy things.
To sing, to fly, migrate, are curious verbs;
beauty, like happiness, frailly reliable,
has nothing to do with why there are wings,
why birds build nests and sing their songs,
or why barbed wire’s besotted with its barbs.