The poet begins by summoning up her memories in a contemporary alternative to the classical invocation to the Muse. They come with the wind in an “arbitrary arsenal” of images, including two characteristically South Asian fabrics: jute and silk. The memories summoned are simple and straightforward in the second stanza,...
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described almost prosaically (“Beside a civil aviation training center”).
The images of the poet’s first home give way to those of a family in the third part of the poem. The visual image is clear and precise, but there is no sound. What they say to each other is “utterly beyond” the poet. Since the last stanza ended with the poet’s first home, this may be a depiction of her mother and father before she was born, since our parents’ first interactions are axiomatically out of our reach.
The fourth stanza returns to the public sphere, with a long parenthesis on poetic images which are more palatable to us than the images of bloodletting, severed tongues, riots, and “The unspeakable hurt of history” (unspeakable in at least two senses). In the fifth and final stanza, we return to the family again, first in the gory details of childbirth and then in the mystical images that flow into her as “mottled memory” and out again as buried stones and dreaming swans.