Probal Basak (Voices Within)

Probal Basak, 31, from India, started his career as a journalist working with Press Trust of India, Business Standard covering mostly socio-political issues. Currently employed as an officer with Department of Information & Cultural Affairs, Government of West Bengal, he writes poetry and his recent works have been published in journals like Dissident Voice, New Verse News, Spillwords, Setu.

A Dead Kingdom

         

She was dead before they noticed she was dying.

They brought a defibrillator –

cannons of water to sprinkle and tear gas to breathe.

They operated, defibrillator kept changing hands

       between the who’s who.

Like a solitary guardrail trying to stop a coup.

At funeral there was no one mourning, only fiery slogans

grieving the market crash –

slogans to put up barbed fencing securing their hatred.

They gathered, screamed – everything at royal behest

         that protest can’t undo.

Like a forsaken bandage that blood oozed through.

Stateless

She is a careless scribbling on the map

but she refuses to accept it.

Not when the lung starts to squeeze

and they stamp on the wings

that silently gets clipped.

Not when the idle wheel on flag runs away

to ferry forgotten stateless tears

that touches no cheeks.

Not when tired legs of barbed fence

long for a leisure walk locking fingers

that no one holds.

She is a careless scribbling and

she refuses to accept it.

When someone tries to erase the lines

she summons the night owls

and they lock her in the cage.

Shelling

Busy fingers of a rough hand making the sound of silence

slip into familiar groove to pry them open with patience, 

I see the green peas, losing their weak pod shell defence, 

are kept in the frying pot amid odour of burning incense.

More and more hands, more and more fingers join to shell

And there, a hidden pea moth, for whom they were on trail,

Gets plucked. Alas, the addicted fingers can’t see, can’t smell,

I see the worm taking all the green peas along to the hell.

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Voices Within-2020 :: Setu, February 2020