He Did Not Like Poetry
Never heard him hum
a line — he said he liked
the meaning more.
Never a man for poetry
he spent forty years
in a room with windows
on all three sides
that he never opened —
the dust washed in.
The dust of the street,
detritus, patients
queuing up outside
for his pain shots,
for his easy grace,
the way he recounted
a whole genealogy
in a single greeting —
so how are you today
Mohammad Ali Rowther?
He was his own
shopkeeper
and a store window
with one lonely mannequinin
a lab coat.
Cave Mouth
The word is a cavern,
ballooning blackness.
Meanings hang in it
upside down,
like somnolent bats.
Its branches
channel musty air.
Its veins wriggle
into a rocky heart.
Your teardrop,
hardened, crystallized,
is a snow boulder
hiding the crevice,
this cave’s mouth.
Jyotish Chalil Gopinathan is a nephrologist residing in Kozhikode. Hawakal published his second collection of poems, Almanac of the Sickle Moon, in 2025. His poems have been published in or are forthcoming in several online journals and magazines including Muse India, Borderless Journal, Poems India, Madras Courier, The Punch Magazine, Annals of Internal Medicine, Ethos Literary Journal, Plato’s Cave Online, The Chakkar, Journal of American Medical Association, Economic and Political Weekly, and Zhagaram Literary Magazine, as well as the anthology Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English 2024. His first poetry collection The Coppiced House was published by Writers Workshop, Kolkata in 2024.