Poetry by Lopa Banerjee

Lopa Banerjee

Lunar Eclipse

The pale moon ushers,
Freckled with dim scars.
The dark night, shrouded by a frosted sheath,
Readies for an earthly carnival.
Under the ashen sky, cars honk,
Bodies huddled together, bemused, waiting
Ensnared by the night’s girth.
Was it the twinkle of the faint star,
Or the eclipsed moonbeam,
Waxing and waning, taking in their mismatched steps
Their sugar-coated small talks?
We have long recycled our fairy tales,
The city beeps in customized ringtones.
Somewhere, from the night’s dark trenches,
Pixie dust gathers around the bodies, on the cars
Getting ready to roll down the streets.
The pixie dust, dotting our eyes,
Lingering on our lips, swirling, surrendering.

Author's Note: Written on September 27, 2015, while witnessing the marvels of a lunar eclipse in a local state park in Omaha, Nebraska. An event that took place after more than three decades and turned us to awed spectators for a brief moment or two.

The Destitute Verse

Acknowledgements: Mandakranta Sen (poet, novelist)

The heart, my dear, a truant, spitfire girl.
The fire burns, trembling, flickering, grueling embers.
The words lay, scrunched, shards of shattered glass.
dance daintily, prance and preen in the mind’s monochrome pastures.
Let them drift apart, and collide sometimes, rummaged,
unpacked, let them be freed of their planned lines, carefully carved chapters.
I wake up to their cacophony; all I can muster is refusal.
I refuse to pick up, chew on the cuds of commonplace stories,
lapped up by all others. I refuse to be the articulate novel, licked,
sucked, chewed, consumed to bone and marrow.
I refuse to be one more clone of the authors spinning around, in multi-colored masks,
Head to toe, crackling with vain, twisted praise, and sycophancy.
I refuse to be that succulent drink reveling on yet another habitual book release,
The decked up, charming whore of the artsy, snooty intellectual.
In my night sky, I dance alone, my sacred bits and pieces,
The slivers of my shattered glasses, my dying, indomitable embers,
the spoonfuls of my stained blood, the fragile chunks of my words,
my battered womanly pride.
The heart, a truant, spitfire girl,
and its unruly words will live on,
Let the birth pangs and the eager tears rise, and explode.