Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 8, Number 1. May 2025. ISSN: 2581-7094
--- Kamalakar
Bhat
The
city leans
on
borrowed ribs.
Elevators
clear their throats
in
a language
the
building was not built to hear.
Migrant
workers bend like commas
against
unfinished sentences.
No
one asks what language they dream in now.
A
man in a pressed shirt
hums
a folk tune as the copier
stamps
a neem leaf on every page corner.
Hill-sized
machines
chew at stolen hills—
gravel in the vowels.
Sickle-light
in the showroom—
a
banyan asleep
in
the desk’s grain.
The
city is a hush of echoes:
mud
toys in concrete coats,
eyes
blinking under neon myths.
A
tea-seller calls out
in
words my grandmother used
to
scold the rain.
A
weed lifts
from
a crack in the pavement,
naming
the sunshine in three tongues.
Beneath
the steel tongue,
coriander
breathes
in
a cupboard of postponed decisions.
Behind
the glass skin of the city,
village shards shift—
a kaleidoscope’s fractured memories.
The
village still crows
in
the city’s chest.
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