Forward Prizes 2025 | An extract from ‘Avidyā‘ by Vidyan Ravinthiran

Continuing our series celebrating the shortlistees of the 2025 Forward Poetry Prizes, here’s a sequence from Vidyan Ravinthiran’s Avidyā – the title is a Vedic Sanskrit word referring to spiritual ignorance – published by Bloodaxe Books.

 

Karna

till Frank fills his nappy—his diaper—
with the babble of scree
leaping down a mountainside

after he mouths that plinky sound
—a pebble dripped into Basho’s pond

he’s inconsolable—big hot tussling
in my arms—then slow—an hour or more

my back aches like glass
a vein of light runs down my side
the feel of not to feel it Keats said

*

it’s then I think
of Karna—the sun god’s son
in the Mahabharata

should’ve been one of the heroes
grew up instead

a driver’s son, insulted, driven
to rage against their undying light

do you know the story
he wanted the perfect weapon
the mantra of the sage Parashurama
would conjure
from the vacant air
—but the old man loathed
warriors of Karna’s caste

so he lied
made himself—I’ve been there—unprepossessing
a simple hermit wishing only to learn

one day Parashurama
pillowed on Karna’s lap
dozed off—imagine
those withered limbs, the moment
of white, slack hair, the face dark as a burned match—

*

I can’t get over—beyond it—
that morning
my father creaked the door ajar
tiptoed in and told me
he was having a heart attack

not to worry—he, a doctor, had made the call—

I thought it was a dream
I fell back asleep

my mother arrived
went with him to the hospital
I stayed behind

with my wrongdoing and the exordium
to this dire this everlasting vigilance

it could have
happened—the worst thing—still could

and if he’d died

the old man who boasts of his strength
the old man who identifies
with Karna
—how could I go on
he’d have killed me too

*

Frank reactive—
prone
as the sunlit air
astral
with dead skin—star-stuff

our son named
for the detective who
has nothing to do
with that Sri Lankan city
though I mix up the spellings

What’s your name?
    —Columbo.
Your first name?
    —Lieutenant.

How many of us—to be frank—
would escape that hectoring question
belong nowhere be nobody

but there’s a little worm of self
that won’t have it that simmers with grievance
this is why

the moment Frank goes to sleep in my arms—
round head slack, breathing even—

at once there develops
a crick in my neck
a spinal twinge
and worst of all
this itch at my right nostril

I’ve got to scratch

*

it’s no good
my body its selfishness must
come first

—my parents
said I must succeed
go on forever
on their behalf and for the sake of all Tamils

how terrible to be a man
on a mission—I can’t be still
the centre of the universe

how do I make it
all about him?

*

so there he was
cradling the old man
when a worm arose

it could mean snake—or prefigure
the arrow of Arjuna
that would end Karna’s life

anyway the worm it crawled bloodily
not over but through his thigh
a flesh-tunnel—silent gore

staining his mendicant’s robe, pale sand, the old man’s hair
but Karna wouldn’t budge
lest he wake the sage

*

meanwhile
Frank extends one hand
index finger and thumb

meeting as he sleeps
as if he were meditating

my pain drains away
turns into something
else—it’s a miracle, I could stay
here forever, holding him, I know now
to not scratch is to win
to become immortal—a marble being—

I think of Heaney’s poem about St. Kevin and the blackbird

my father, refusing
to waken
me—and Karna—

*

kindness and pride
—my father experiences neither pleasure or pain
or so he says
it was my role in the family to have experiences
to represent—happy or unhappy
upholding our
immigrant endeavour

I was Krishna
doing my own epochal thing

that blue boy
ate earth
—his mother, when she prised his lips open
saw floating there and modelled in mud
the solar system or was it somehow
the real thing and no model?

*

who can understand
a selflessness that moves
beyond all reason
to the point of worshipping
its own rigour

or the secret
sunshine of that love
men shape between them
into unspeaking darkness

*

the sage awoke and saw
the blood—straightaway he knew
what had happened
and what’s more

“you lied to me,” he said
“only a warrior—a kshatriya—would keep silent
through such terrible pain
only such a man
would be so needlessly brave
—you deceived me
and so I will teach you
the mantra but when you most need it
you will forget the words”

*

last night in his crib
Frank opened
his wet fresh-painted eyes

our golden child
has forgotten how to sleep
he thinks it involves screaming and kicking

it’s enough to make you wonder
how does anyone do it

how do we cede ourselves how acquiesce
how does one line of a poem lead to another
how for the first time
does one say “I love you” 

one hand
a tiny moist starfish
searched the air
for a rung a presence which wasn’t there

*

the gods made stick
Karna’s chariot wheel
in the mud

so Arjuna could fire
arrows through his heart

Karna died softly on his belly
with a single tear glowing down his cheek
like Marion Crane in Psycho
—Frank when he gives up
on tummy time
turns his head to one side
still as the tomb
before his thumb finds his mouth or his mouth his thumb

Karna’s heart
was protected once
by a radiant breastplate—the kavach he was born with

Indra, to set things in motion,
appeared in the form of a beggar
requesting politely
he tear it, pound of flesh and all, from his chest

for Karna could refuse nobody
in the dawn hours
that was one of his stupid macho rules

*

in this way the gods contrive everything
they pick the winners and losers
for even that detail about the stuck wheel of his chariot
was a little jab wasn’t it
at how they’d torn from Karna his birthright
made him a driver’s son

*

when I was a little boy
my father took me for drives

time together
I remember a flooded lane

rainy sunlit leaves—a cattlegrid—
happiness—

*

I lower Frank
to his mother’s breast
his arms windmilling like Arbogast’s
exhilarated fear

seeing the nipple
he reorients
like the saint in the Stri Parva
hung upside-down in a spiky pit
about to die—reaching out
for a taste of honey

what does Frank’s
mixed skin
remind me of?

Trinco’s Marble
Beach—maintained
by the airforce
—mournfully glowing

*

Karna learned the mantra anyway
—the charade
of struggling to remember

on the battlefield
the magic words—embracing
the myth he’d become

my father’s back
was pierced by the sacred hooks
he danced in the dust with the kavadi on his shoulders

taking on, he said, our whole family’s pain 
but yes pleased to be looked at to be seen
grandiosely suffering

*

see that’s what you call resentment

the ambivalence love can’t shake
how terrible to think

Frank will both love and hate me
before and after I die

Karna should’ve guessed his provenance
in the daylight he felt good—the sun’s son

come dusk he weakened in each mental sinew
for as Ramanujan tells us
every day is different

but night is ancient is immemorially the same

*

I don’t want to
leave you in the dark

*

those days
before I
went to sleep
he—my father—
in a ritual hush
applied
holy ash
thiruneeru
to my forehead
with slow rubs
of his thumb—as one
might cherish
the tender button
between a woman’s thighs

he whispered in rhythm
words beyond me
I stared at the ceiling and thought of England

afterwards
he kissed me on the mouth
on the unlit landing
and we embraced—one of us
standing, to make room, 
a step above the other
 

Extracted from Avidyā by Vidyan Ravinthiran, published by Bloodaxe Books. See all the books on the Forward Prize shortlists here.