Excerpt: Ìsǘ Le Songs of Ordinary Days 

II

This morning,
when I heard my neighbour’s spade
rub against the earth outside my house,
I thought of my mother’s garden.

The grounding perfume,
and the wild weed’s breath,
made me think of her warmth.

Sometimes home is a fragrance,
warm and dear.

***

IV

This morning,
I woke up
and lingered in a quiet pause,
thinking of boiling potatoes
with herbs from my mother’s garden.
Oh, they would taste wonderful
with smoked meat curry from last night.

I woke up,
eager to greet
the sweet adventures
of daylight.

***

V

This morning,
I woke up
next to my cat,
a gorgeous black cat.
How she slept in stillness,
unbothered by the murmurs of the world.
I envied her,
and thought to myself
that I could be a black cat someday,
unaware of weary thoughts
and the weight of the mundane,
just be fed and pampered.

***

XX

This morning,
I called my sister,
to tell her
about the beautiful dream
I had of her last night.

Beautiful dreams should be told
in the morning.

The day will bloom brighter,
and the heart, happier.

A good dream makes you
survive a long prosaic day.

***

XXV

My father loves watermelons
but he calls them cucumbers.
He just wouldn’t agree
that watermelons are not cucumbers
and cucumbers are not watermelons.

It is April,
and watermelons are in abundance.
My father brings them home
each time he goes to the market.
This afternoon too,
he bought watermelons
from the farmer’s market
and said, Let’s have some cucumbers.

Father, they are watermelons, I said.

But we don’t have a word for watermelon
in my mother tongue.
We call them cucumber
in my mother tongue,
my father replied.

***

XXXI

My family had an orange farm when I was little.
December days were always filled with
cheerful fragrance of oranges.
Our orange trees
bent to the fruits they bore,
and the part of the fertile mountain it grew in
was painted with colours of greenish yellow and peach.
December
meant harvesting truckload of oranges.
Orange peeling
and orangey yellow hands
marked our childhood years.

How we loved those bright-sunny
and fragrant winter days.

Father would take us down the hills,
and our tiny hands would each pick an orange
to fill the bamboo baskets one at a time.
When I was very little,
I remember my father being young
and my mother, so radiantly youthful.
There were no wrinkles on their skin then.
Their youth resembled the oranges we picked —
plump and luscious.
I have always had a deep liking for oranges.
Not ever did I wonder
why I have always affectionately loved them,
until this afternoon
when I stumbled upon this part of my childhood,
while walking by the alley of unvisited memory lane.

***

Excerpted with permission from Ìsǘ Le Songs of Ordinary Days by Inakali Assumi published by Red River 2025