Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 8, Number 1. May 2025. ISSN: 2581-7094
--- Subranshu Maitra
Driving down the typical brick mortar concrete
fusion of three centuries in the heart
delinquent wanton Promethean city
on an October afternoon,
you would hardly notice anything
even remotely resembling fission
in the grey houses, teeming winding lanes
branching off the traffic-clogged road,
warren of bylanes and alleys,
or the dust-filmed glum green sanctuary trees
battling the rising tide of corrosive polluting attrition.
The phase beginning in October is a wrinkle,
a long ambiguous interim, a placid uneventful
space between the months of baptismal rain
and the trepidation in the fugitive approach
of febrile
spring.
But by late February
fission slams fusion.
A dazzling flower-framed onset
engulfs the road.
a short-lived spring onslaught
intensely local and cosmic in its range of
memory meaning and complex patterns
of imagination. The doomed festive flowers
entwine pain joy horror transience
and rapture around the overhanging boughs
rich with renewal and longing
often overarching the road.
Yet sizzling local wars are raging
elsewhere and bombs drones bullets
missiles and starvation
find their most natural allies
in women and children.
Fugitive spring, flower-ratified in
neighbouring roads and streets
While fierce spring elsewhere
drowns the ever-returning ceremony of spring
in war………
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Bio:
Subranshu Maitra
is a translator of Bengali prose, fiction and poetry into English, He is also a
poet who has published two books of verse - When My Mother Sang and The
Dark Harvest.
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