“Reconnecting to Culture” K.Mehta Poetry

Crystallized

My grandfather had a pottery wheel in his home.

I was too young to remember anything but touch

when I first sunk my hands into that blanket of Earth before me,

my fingers baby blue and bright with the remnants

of another failed art project. 

That wheel, a relic from the old country–

The one I only knew from the embroidered jungles that adorned my grandmother’s clothes.

It was my grandfather who cocooned the brindled backs of my hands as I learned 

to beat open the honeydew hearts of the toughest shells–

The week’s first snapdragons always watching me from the windowsill,

sheltered in a vase he had molded with his own two hands,

the buds twinkling in the reflection of the crystals that rested beside them–

A gift from a fretful auntie who believed luck could be packaged away and preserved.

It was those stones that sat, silent and tranquil,

as my grandfather dwindled to dust,

his bones succumbing to a disease I couldn’t pronounce–

His creations lined with dust motes, 

the breath of clay strangled with just a spattering. 

It is those stones that my grandmother carries to his funeral in the pocket of her coat–

clutching them close, away from the unfeeling autumn rain. 

Outside, the world continues to rush,

but here, time is thick like honey–

slathered over the eulogy,

dripping behind black veils. 

We drive back, sunlight fractured

by the bitter stings of winter already lingering in the air.

Someone who looks like me 

is selling flowers on the offramp–
She could have been beautiful once,

but there is no one left to remember.
The child that hugs her shins, 

cheeks bluing beneath a thin pink coat, 

will know nothing but cold stars,

distant and divine. 

We too were once nomads

whose faces bore the scars of sandstorms–

parched and unquestioning. 

‘Til the day someone’s sun-baked hands reached beyond,

and tore the sky away, lapis blue and lustrous.

And my grandfather said that it was in that sweep of desert,

where our bones lay a thousand generations deep,

that we first tasted destiny.

Where hands, wind-whipped and weathered, first turned dust into dreams. 

As I flipped splashes of white clay over the dimpled backs of my hands,

he asked me to listen for their voices,

let them tell me what was next–

I never could hear them. 

In the months after his death,

relatives poke and prod at his makings,

picking away until everything is gone–

A lifetime lifted away, a home left hollow.

But I return, with something like hope and something like hunger–

Breathe in that scent of life,

winding beneath me, a bequest 

that longs and languishes until it 

yields no more, until it is remade

better than before. 

Something calls nomads home–

The promise of something unbending,

unending.

And so I shape and sift our dreams,

kaolin clay, thick and airy,

coating my hands with promise.
I am the chosen architect of 

a future nearly within our grasp. 

An auntie’s dream-catcher crystals

linger on the windowsill–

This time I let them speak. 

Pali Hill Dreamin’

I come from the water,

deep, dark, and deathly. 

I come from stones that still rivers,

the last licks of life. 

I come from the boy on the boat,

who watched his brother die.

I come from that broken heart 

hidden behind ebony eyes. 

I come from fish-foot falls,

and a starved stomach. 

But subsist on dreams, 

chewing on every last wisp. 

I come from rainbowed rupees,

stuffed in rubber room envelopes,

Sent to a mother’s address,

somewhere in the stars. 

I come from that bakery nestled on the street’s shoulder,

from worn bronze hands covered in naught but flour. 

I come from forty years of struggle, 

of pristine white cotton stained with life’s laments.

From the day we bought that house next to the movie stars, 

and the kids bought Cadillac blue clothes.

I come from the house that faced the sea,

Arabian blue dancers who never sleep. 

I come from the eyes that bridged the distance 

from that house to home.

Mama’s Curls

My father furrows his brow at the azure marks on

my new gara,

now embellished with a sodden sugar tapestry.

I hide my hands sticky blue, and bright

behind my back.

Kool-Aid, rich in chemicals, 

the culprit.

Parsi grandmothers gift us embroidered garments, 

tightly threading the waistlines together 

with timeworn brown fingers–

my baby blossom body barely slipping beneath.

My mother sits in the corner, 

soft linen ensconcing her slender frame.

A flat iron planted before her,

she prises apart her tangles with a wide-toothed comb. 

I don’t think my mother has ever liked her curls.

They stand staunch, like banyan branches, 

reaching away from her fingers.

Mixed blood baffles her follicles

into deformations that 

bend like iron under a blacksmith’s touch–

self-prescribed paralysis. 

In later years I would learn that my mother spent her youth

wandering amongst girls with golden hair that was slicker than wet marble. 

She donned a crown of hissing black asps–

a constant blare in an otherwise waxen world. 

An aunt first took her to straighten her hair when she was fourteen.

And Mama watched that day as her curls were 

naturalized–

As she was granted her green card,

as foreigner fled away,

as her classmates grimaces

split into smiles. 

That day, a flat iron became her escutcheon. 

Her defense against the wide, white world 

that branded her,

half-breed.

That’s why Mama smooths past it,

trying not to cry while wrestling with the flat iron. 

Domesticating her curls,

and quietly force-feeding herself 

assimilation.

Her ritual masks us for another day,

but even 150 degrees of blistering heat

cannot burn away the clash of her blood–

the clash of mine.

Reconnecting to Culture

These poems speak to the struggle that members of diasporic communities often face when trying to reconnect with their cultural identity and heritage. I tried to address broad issues such as the pull of tradition, the desire to assimilate, and the pain of discrimination through a personal lens in the hopes of highlighting the fact that each individual's experience with diaspora's difficulties is unique. 

About the Poet

K. Mehta is a high school poet whose work has been published in The Cloudscent Journal, Apprentice Writer, and The New York Times. Her work has also been honored by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Smith College, Hollins University, and the National Council of English Teachers. Much of her work centers on the complexities of her Indian and Iranian heritage, and her experience coming from an immigrant family.