I went to visit
the house of a poet
who died in the war.
His house
was not like his poems.
The things inside
were not like the words
he had written.
The chair,
the bed,
the dining table,
the kitchen…
Everything had become
A sign of war.
Ash lay spread everywhere.
Darkness covered
the corridors of the small rooms.
Around the house,
the wind swung heavily
on the trees.
In every poem,
he had repeatedly spoken
of a river.
A thin trembling stream of it
came to touch
the cracked floor of the house.
Only one window opening eastward
remained undamaged.
Beyond it—
a glimmer of something far away.
What it was
could have astonished us
even with a single sentence.
But the poet,
the one who could do that,
had already died in the war.
Acknowledgements
Image credits: Fujita Tsuguharu. Interior, House in Dordogne (1940). Material: oil on canvas. Dimensions: 45.5 × 53.3 cm (17.9 × 21.0 inches). Image courtesy: Artizone Museum © Fondation Foujita / ADAGP, Paris & JASPAR, Tokyo, 2026 C5311.
Besides the artist’s signature use of lime-washed-white there is the odd flatness of perspective. It is as if we’re being shown a room remembered in a dream. The three layers of indirection–painting, dream, memory–have a correspondence with the three layers of indirection in the poem: text, remembered text, and a room empty of the poet who’d conceived it. It felt right we should juxtapose the two.
Translator | Melin Nova
Melin Nova is a Malayalam poet and translator based in Kerala, India. His writing has appeared in TrueCopy, Madhyamam, Chandrika, and Deshabhimani Weekly. He received the 2026 PNS Yuva Kavitha Award. [Source: Translator’s text]
Author | Nazeer Kadikkad
Nazeer Kadikkad is a Malayalam poet who lives in Kerala. He has published three poetry collections: Kaa Kaa (2002, Current Books), Froyidum Njaanum (2022, Logos Books), and Aadhyathe Kavitha (2024, Notion Press). His poems have also been translated into other South Indian languages. [Source: Translator’s text]
