Teesta Review: A
Journal of Poetry, Volume 7, Number 2. November 2024. ISSN: 2581-7094
Things that cannot be seen
Belong to me as sap holding my fire.
Words are my heritage, my ancestors’ sound sleep
On an ancient shifting river bank.
I build kingdoms out of words
I talk through the pages of men
Till the air turns viscous, rude
And I am simply the blank space.
Confined within a pyre of my father’s wishes
I fear for a day without words
No Ishtar or Inanna of the Mesopotamians
To save me from an embryo in the dark.
I visit a face you know to be your own
Through freedom, you lead me to the first fire.
Corridors of uncertainties are my legacy,
A fire smiting mouth of a dragon.
I don’t know how can I communicate
Like the earth’s first fire
Out of wonder, trust
With the dazzling eyes of the forest green.
Fire to fire, I crossed,
Plants rewriting history, my family tree
In the Durga temple of words, prayers
Spinning out of my tenor of fire.
Random thoughts rose and rose
At the feet of Helios
Within the hearth, beads of light
From my first of idioms
Not knowing who honoured whose rite.
Poems to Poems
(Inspired
by a painting by Samudra Sengupta)
As the summer rain sails over my thoughts
Longing makes me of its own, native light of my
soul.
The silent waters of the Ganges
Carrying the light of my eyes, moving
Today, partly delayed is my mind’s sun,
Bit hesitant. Someone calls me to meet in deep dark.
Today, light
has a voice, mysterious caller tones
You call; my desire has an evening, my unuttered
mate.
Poems to poems is a long walk to freedom, sol invictus.
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