Poetry: Amit Shankar Saha

Amit Shankar Saha

1. At Dusk

Two girls play hide and seek
In a rail track house
Brambles grow on abandoned hours
A stream sways boats to long-term sleep
Clothes smile from voyeur stiles
A crooked tree mothers an orphan doll
An old woman on a broken roof
Stares and stares at passing time
A crowd of lights shouts in the eyes
A chiaroscuro dies on the wall
This mofussil life will wither and fade
And no difference to you it will make
What if I climb a railway bridge
And jump from there to cause a blip?
The world will sink into your mind
It will be dark and we will sing

2. Sleeping

When the last vestige of the night
spends its last breath
and I find that I have
slept all through it
and missed the Leonid shower,
I search the sky for Sagittarius.
On dark warm winter nights
when my grandmother's asthma
crawls into a street child's lungs
and wakes him up into paroxysms
of an impending death,
I recall how I have slept.
I recall how I have lived
when I was asleep
and how every awakening
has been a living death,
how every struggle to breathe in
is a constellation missing.

3. The Eyes

A slow train at Talit
looks befuddled at fields
of ripe green memories.
Under a lame grey cloud
a late evening descends
in a hurried darkness.
But the asthmatic night
of urgent forgetting
strains to take every breath.
Your eyes unsight while I
search for the person who
hides and writes my poems.

4. Recall

When love became a four letter word
We spilled the letters on the floor.
And observing Murphy's laws
They rolled into inaccessible corners.
Sometimes when I remember you
In white amidst the pink flowers
Or in red in front of the green trees
I crave for those lost letters.
I recall your face in the dark
and tear the night with the curve of your lips.
I recall your voice in my dreams
and leave a song in the city of sleep.
I recall ossified emotions when
you search in your bag where you kept your eyes.

5. Pictures

When poetry came in pictures
you were a woman in red,
sometimes a spot of scarlet
amidst the green and the grey,
an indigo stream runs through the rocks,
pink and maroon monasteries,
white clouds climb up the brown hills,
virgin territory all...
and the children raising their hands,
posing for photographs

beside the lake, beside the trees
and the flags fluttering in the breeze,
my morning rolls up its sleeves,
and the tides of the night softly cease.

Setu, July 2018