The last time.

If my grief has lost it’s bite, what will I write about? Will my words have guts and grit, will they make you cry?  I got the colour palette mixed up,  the hues lost in words I never wanted to have to say. I never did find the knives that were pulled out  of my…

afloat…

We indulge our passions, unthinking of the ripples we make. I am most alive when I am dead underwater, cocooned in it’s gentle caress. No hacking cough, not even the pain that shoots down my leg on land. This poem flows therefrom like the drops that slide off my back as I take a turn…

Mountains of missing…

We wrest from the Earth what we cannot possibly return, the rocks, the Rhododendron claiming it to be our own; a sad little goat tied to a pole, bleating for a mother, a ghost  long slaughtered. Any stretch of land, we strip and tar and pave, get a shout-out for this  impudent achievement. People throng…

the mountains, the mountains…

These are the mountains, the misty mountains where the rocks wait, to sing in chorus,  frowning music into a scar. Here there are mountains, closed, misty mountains they do not care if we aren’t. Or are,  for that’s how it is and always were. For in the larger scheme of things, life is not life,…

The Game.

The board is set at birth, dices roll  the aim is never to win. Only to play and remain standing the game is to get free. A curse to the past,  A hymn to the present The game never stops  Until the dead end. There’s the truth and the lies the game, it knows them…

Different shores.

All seas are one, in a manner of speaking,water flows to water. Standing at the Bay of Bengalmy feet are touched by waves that may have kissedPacific shores. No matter how we look at it,all Gods too, are one, even the ones that are not.  I thought of my mother, on a Fowler’s bed,who could…

dust to dust

The end is always near, Death waits right round  the corner, softly  watching your approach nearer than the second before;  Fear is superfluous: for all that is born, will  die one day; the jewels you lust after will glitter in someone else’s ear. The house we built, too  will fall to seed with the wind…

Water on water (#worldpoetryday)

Water on water: the things that matter. Impossible to describe the deep empty longing, in the voice of dogs.  My childhood was elsewhere.  The light shone,  a thread through the eye  of a needle I had to fit into.  Calcutta is a big city, the grandest in our region.  But the wind still howls,  specially…

The study

The first November rain fell, bringing  with it a mild scent of winter, I know you will not be in your study, a room that I have not, cannot, enter ever nor will, where the door always was open  for me. Yet, in my mind today,  I revisit that home, I think of your aftershave,…

The Ganges at Chinsurah

Floating on the river I realise  it’s not the setting sun or the bridge  in the distance, it’s a woman in whose  arms lives have been lost and loved.  The river today is not the same as yesterday and the water snaking will be changing soon, The river today changes by the second yet remains…

The graveyard.

In this graveyard a boy once proposed to me,  We were young and callous and the world  Lay at our feet. We climbed the broken wall  To get inside, we did that often, my friends and I Daring each other to stay on till dark, exploring Among tombstones, reading aloud the words  Left for the…