Teesta Review:
A Journal of Poetry, Volume 2, Number 1. May 2019. ISSN: 2581-7094
City Underbelly
Dust, debris, hollow bones and living skeletons
Accrue when spoken verses are interspersed,
Nights speak in unfamiliar words,
whispers are now wounded and buried.
How different would the air be in tram depot?
The look at the sky seems dismal, breathing the difference,
Shadows are all there near the crossing
Exchanging letters of the past.
Listening carefully the conversation
Below the light post, night birds raise their voices,
Streets are deserted, the edges of the sidewalk
Searching for the hidden anguish,
Someone you have always known, loved,
Precipitate a conclusion that feels rushed,
The glass windows are capturing the enticing glances,
With aimless blusters of the noisy people.
Everywhere else the allure, the shining appeal is palpable
Coffee stained memory still lingers in silence.
Spectrum
Then may be no more
hatred,
No more fighting
The shame and fury erase,
The day shines in the
city as if
It never happened
Not framed as epitaph
The troubling past lives
on
Vividly and urgently,
Attentive to the
silences,
Are the memorial pillars
and columns
Relinquishing nothing to
the past.
Sneaking through the
vents
Seething in resentments
and cries,
The darkness takes almost
everything away,
condemns you
To live in a dirty, narrow
alley
The tortured world
witnessing
gloom yet the strong
winds
pause and ponder,
Removing the veil of
gloom!
Against the boundless
limit of light.
Pale evening lights up as
if to dispatch
from a live scene,
the different tenors of
life with
blood and nothing more,
sketching punctuation to
the twist
And turns of history.
Delivering interludes,
the unspoken words and silent
cries
Come to light,
as the most known urban landscape
lurches
beneath the crumpled
souls.
My City
The pigeons are flying over the tramlines
Directionless,
The rusting window panes surrender
To the shining glass and steel,
The narrow alley recalls the floating
flute notes,
weak bodies and blank faces encounter
emptiness and chaos,
Down past the leaf, down to the clay mound,
The dry flowers settle down,
Wings shut tight,
The butterflies are now born from grieving.
To leave or to return with housekeys
The anguish inside the trees is palpable,
Past shadows are descending down the staircase
Formless,
Building above and below us,
The concrete blocks
Stich memories of my city in frail bones, in detached
retinas.