“An Orphaned Clothesline” by Debasish Mishra

Debasish Mishra is a Senior Research Fellow at National Institute of Science Education and Research, HBNI, India, who has earlier worked with United Bank of India and Central University of Odisha. He is the recipient of the 2019 Bharat Award for Literature and the 2017 Reuel International Best Upcoming Poet Prize. His recent poems have appeared in Arkana, Apricity, Hawaii Pacific Review, York Literary Review, Dash Literary Journal, and elsewhere. His first book Lost in Obscurity and Other Stories was published by Book Street Publications, India, in 2022.

A Word from the Author:

This poem was written during the pandemic. It highlights the impact of COVID on the working class in India. The woman in the poem, who doesn't return to take back the clothes that were left to dry in the sun, is a metonym for a large number of the population. Having seen the deaths of a few friends and acquaintances, I wanted to reflect the inevitability of death and the lack of a choice for the working class. 

---

An Orphaned Clothesline

(for a mother who died of COVID)

When bodies cease to exist

their relics cling to clothes

the smell of skin and the music

of voices lost in a babble

The clothes know the secrets

of the bodies like mirrors

where there was a mole

where there was a sore

The clothesline admits the secrets

and resets to a tabula rasa

the dance of democracy

to the tunes of the breeze

where every cloth gets

an equal share of the sun

where everything is cleaned

every organ is cleansed

but the clothesline can’t forget

the brown hands that blistered

with washing powder and left

the clothes to dry between

the wall and the sun like

a variegated streak of streamers

Those hands won’t come again

to take these clothes home