poetry – Page 3 – ipsita banerjee

Erasing Bodies

Ars Poetica* (after Kenyatta Rogers) All poetry ought to be torn and thrown, unless someone picks up the pieces, pastes them together with tape as if it means something to them. Like toilet paper dissolving in the pot, the scribbles on the wall scrubbed out when you were three. Life is a waiting room, we…

Dachau Concentration Camp

We destroy, we maim, we claim and kill what we cannot hold on to. We inter the bones, burn the bodies of dissident thoughts, place our fears in isolated camps and call it freedom. There is no comfort to be found And hope is in retreat. All that is, is politics and war, it’s insidious…

A dream

Last night in a dream, I thought I saw my mother I tried to visualise her, sitting on her chair book in hand, the one she was reading most of which I never understand. I like fiction, she liked reality. So the books she gave me were left unread, like the books I gave her…..

2025: pro familia

It’s another year rolling around, they tell me, get your act together write more, sound happy for a change, give up on those terrible habits, travel alone (if you must), but forget not the “responsibilities“. In court, stand strong, work hard, write that perfect affidavit, (is anything ever perfect?) be there. For the family. Be…

Un-beaten

I have learned to live with Ghosts they often break bread with me, they taught me to run headlong into the Storm, stride out into the Darkness, for waiting for the Rain to stop never would help me… or anyone. I have had plenty lessons along the way on how to be Lightning, scorching the…

The boat

For every silver lining hiding a cloud can wreck your hearth and home. For every two birds your eyes will see one or the other will have flown. For every light at the end of a tunnel is a train to mow you down. For every pretty fish in the sea there is a shark…

lets begin

“Time is not linear but a deck of cards that is continuously shuffled.” -Paul Tremblay (The Pallbearers Club). After those long nights have been stored for another day and relegated to the back of the closet, there’s nothing to fear, save that the moon is turning away and the night will be at its darkest….

Burned

I want to write life and living in different measurements. An inch of blood, a spool of grief, a whit of joy or unhappiness, a quarter of the sand of the past, the salinity of impermanence. That night I tossed and turned awash in seas of despair… From far, far (too far, I thought)…

Corners

Times you wish You could huddle Into a corner And wait As the world went by… Hell, times you wish YOU were that Bloody corner And the world Just went by.

Ducks in a row

The night is bored, the black it wears, torn at the shoulders… forever painted bleak, bringing in the darkness night after night with no other colour it ever wore. The evening listens to the song of the last koel that called and went and waited at the temple steps crossed legged, but no one returned…

Home?

I have no idea where the days are slipping, when it is night; the diurnal circuit fulfilling itself and time is just a tide. My time is watching little faces as they speak and move the human circuit grinding along where words have no refuge. Am I home, I ask myself is this, then, where…

Tomorrow

You smell the same, a combination of Old Spice and talcum powder, The fragrance I know but never remember Weaving into my thoughts as I ponder. Like the letters I wrote but never posted Like the letters that returned “Address un-known” I am that person, that unknown girl That I already have grieved but walks…