Voices Within: Purabi Bhattacharya

Purabi Bhattacharya lives and works in Gujarat. She has a Collection of poems Call Me (2015) published by Writers Workshop India. She is in the panel of book reviewer for Muse India. A Shillong born, she continues to live in her NRC- free hiraeth, wandering with the clouds, cascading with the waterfalls, hounded by butterflies and poets of eminence alike.

Still undulant

 Dear me,

 how does it feel to be and be not

 in love and out

 forty,

 forty one

 fifty times still undulant

 from hills to plain lands

 to run into wild, wilder scrolling eyes

 hit by

 pedestrians, car drivers on sixth gear

 nature lovers, least to forget, self-acclaimed photographers. Giving away

 in charity the happy lost gaze, the most natural thing

 inhaling west wind, resplendent

 with ache cells

 wanting to be left caressed

 twisted, tousled

 left a woman, sponged

 in

 span

 inebriated.

 How does it feel

 smoking in and out

 successive hyperboles

 and then

 going through

 one after another

 miscarriages

 of belief

 of lines after lines

 of infant poems

 out of shape

 and left with

 lump of trials and triumphs

 in temperate times.

Harvest bonfire

It is only fair to give up chasing georgette thoughts

you know would soon branch off

into veldts or may be into the desert dunes

burn to ashes, in buxom summer.

Soon it’d fill in somebody’s script

lose its sacred strands

with every readers gaping eye, it’d soon become

swear of the town.

Why not place greying thoughts, bile, fear,

fatigue, grief in the mind plate

and let chronic dreariness be

fed to the bursting fire of harvest bonfire.

 breathe out:

 dum spiro spero[1]

 dum spiro spero

Mock smoke

 (for Shillong)

i am often taken to a city, still dark, waking up to heavily sleepy

rain slitting morning. You miss the sound of the church bell too.

Everything is as sluggish as the last winter mornings

with very few to brave December gloom

streets get wider. Those countable commons

take a downcast stroll up and down the hills, waiting for spring

let out mock smoke. Sometimes succulent dreams are better inebriants.

Ajit Das & co.

 the Bauls

always untwine the mystery

but just before they do that

they split your head into two

feed you the taboo

 flesh-bone tale

 and not a thing less not more.

 Here begins their invocation

their celebration of both life

and its shredding

ascetic, ecstatic

around fire, ashes

skulls, incense

local made alcohol

 Radhe Krishna

 Radhe Krishna

and they sing…

to wake you up

from a lifelong lull

and they whisper to you: “night is beautiful, baba!

 let it exploit you!”

wall to wall

migratory birds break into the hiatus

of a day- parting sky. In perfect

beat breathing, flapping,

leaving dreams scattered in their trails.

Exquisite. Exhibitive. Carrying

the collection of the day. Nothing

rigmarole. I stand at my terrace

anticipating, with a net spread

to count on my blessings, if any.

The house has already been

dark and death cry evenly distributed

wall to wall.

It is the cry of an overgrown embryo, a widow

lying in memory bag and leitmotifs

for seventy-five years

the world has wronged her, and the desert

spider has found a hideout upon her back.

This winter a bunch of banana trees

cover the viewing. It disconnects us

from our distant hiraeth. These bunches

solemnly picket our unassembled thoughts too. In all

of these and more, my empty days look for ink.

---

[1] Latin: while I breathe, I hope!

Voices Within - Complete List of Poets :: Setu, January 2019