Featured Poem III • April 2018
After Pandora
Maya Chhabra
. . . but Hope did not escape. She lay, domesticated, in the echoing jar, and now and then they would raise the lid a crack to hear her sweet whispers like a lover’s as he mops fever-soaked hair. And after sunburnt labors in the stony field that had been given them for a country, by night they would remember how blessed we were, the intimates of Hope. The maiden, at last freed from the feral company of stinging things— censorship and informers and madhouses and bullets—now loosed, contented herself with the pious duties of consolation. But, cursed with imagination, they saw her in dreams resplendent and blinding, glorious above all, impossible to contain. Then, awakening, they hoarded her, kept her safe in the kitchen in her homely clay jar, next to the salt. They had need of her, her sovereign ministrations, the only salve for the civic sickness. Visions ignored took their vengeance, pursued them as the god of storms pursued his fugitive prophet. One day they lifted the lid, just to see her unspool herself to her full height, to know how the light became her. Timid, she would have retreated, but they loved her and, loved, she grew bold. They coaxed her out the window, where she fluttered nearby. Stubbornly they shooed her off, and then looked at each other and laughed, and drank to a hopeless cause. Meanwhile she rose over the bruised land . . .
Maya Chhabra is a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cascadia Subduction Zone, Star*Line, Liminality, and Through the Gate. Her fairy-tale novelette Walking on Knives was published by Less Than Three Press. She lives in New York City, and can be found on Twitter as @mayachhabra and on WordPress as MayaReadsBooks.
She wrote that “After Pandora” was “inspired by the myth of Pandora, from whose box Hope did not escape, and the concept of hoarding hope. If you give hope to others, do you lose it yourself? The line ‘and drank to a hopeless cause’ is a reference to the Soviet dissident toast ‘To the success of our hopeless cause,’ which I first heard of from my Russian professor in college. Though the poem is not intended to only apply to one time period or country, that setting gives rise to some of the imagery of ‘censorship and informers and madhouses and/bullets.’ ‘After Pandora’ pays tribute to those who, whether in hope or in despair themselves, did their civic duty in the face of terrible repression and gave hope to others.”
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