“WE BUY GOLD” by Pujita Verma

September 26, 2024

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “WE BUY GOLD” by Pujita Verma, winner of the 2024 Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award! Due to its formatting, this poem is only available as an image.

WE BUY GOLD

By Pujita Verma

there is a process of melting what you know removing its impurities. forgive ancestral inheritance in exchange for rewritten precedent: selling grandmother’s Nani’s gold at a pawn shop to keep lights on leaving a legacy of women who could not leave. my mother not named in the will, a way birthright can be selective of gender. on another continent, Nani collected precious metals in her closet’s labyrinth called on exit strategy for her daughter: an intergenerational justice. watch whole wars wage for a commodity worth more than its weight in memory. think jhumkis, bangles, maang tikka— a lineage of wedding adornments passed down in ceremony. it takes three years before I locate lexicon, tell my mother. she believes me. we leave customs of culture & candidacy; those teach us fear & retribution as resistant to corrosion. while Nani drifts in the CCU after waiting decade to re-meet grandchild I’m shopping markets of Chandni Chowk passing time until visiting window opens briefly— threads of my new lenghas unravelling. I’d learned Hindi through an app for months before making trip to Delhi her village dialect I still couldn’t dissect without intermediary. all I’d know of her is an untranslation of proximity. how she’d been engaged at eight (age, another theory of relativity). last time I’d see her & I couldn’t articulate goodbye, cycles of reincarnation eclipsing gratitude. at her wake, neighbours tell me how they’d watched her hold me, a baby on the balcony basking in the sunlight’s glory. there is a process of melting what you are told about purity. remember, even love can be an economy of scale. like golden hope, when abundant, will tip everything in your favour.

Copyright © Pujita Verma

Winner of the 2024 Arts & Letters Club of Toronto Foundation Poetry Award.

Pujita Verma is an Indo-Canadian poet and illustrator. Her poem “Footnotes for the Toronto Sky” is featured across the Toronto Transit Commission Network, and she was Mississauga’s second Youth Poet Laureate (2018-20). Last year, she won the League of Canadian Poets Broadsheet Contest, a Mississauga Arts Council Award, the Eden Mills Writer’s Festival Literary Contest, and was runner-up for the Janice Colbert Poetry Award. Pujita is the Youth Outreach Representative for Antler River Poetry and she works for War Child.

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