Lopa Banerjee |
Lopa Banerjee is an author, poet,
translator, editor with six books and four anthologies in fiction and poetry.
She lives in Dallas, Texas with her family where she also teaches Creative
Writing at Richland College and Texas Christian University. She has been a
recipient of the Journey Awards (First Place category winner) for her memoir
‘Thwarted Escape: An Immigrant’s Wayward Journey’, and also a recipient of the
Woman Achiever Award (IWSFF, 2018), the International Reuel Prize for Poetry
(2017) and International Reuel Prize for her English translation of Nobel
Laureate Tagore’s selected works of fiction (2016). Her nonfiction essays,
fiction and other writings have been published in various journals, e-zines and
anthologies in India, UK and USA. She has been an honorary poetry fellow at
Rice University, Houston. Her book of stories ‘All That Jazz & Other
Pathbreaking Tales was released on Amazon Kindle recently. For more on Lopa: www.lopabanerjeewrites.com
Love Poem For America
I call you a crystal-clear
fluid
Coursing through my veins,
Sometimes, you give me walls
to shut me in,
And let me slide into
devouring linens
And smells of shadowy rooms,
the ebb and flow of sex.
I have drunk you whole, your
silent fumes
And labels, your grocery
stores and neon-lit streets--
The way I have drunk my
morning coffee,
But our childhood is
unshared.
You, for instance can never
meet
My six-year-old self-swinging
in a rusty swing
Running over hopscotch
squares in the open terrace
And see the bouts of my
father’s temper, the rituals of cigarette
Burning in our old verandah,
footsteps swirling in the house,
The first rains that bore
flowers hanging from the boughs,
The widowed aunt making the
dough of delectable pati-sapta
For the Sankranti, and the
surreal festive songs.
In the remembered wind drift,
our presents collide,
And I stop, seasoned,
ambivalent in your tracks,
Watching the cars blur into
the swift obeisance of traffic,
The vernacular poetry that
had exploded into the mouth.
I hang loose, somewhere
between acknowledgment
And the steady, insistent
odor of change.
I can never meet your
splintered history of assimilation
Your postmodern lies, the
curse and blessings of alien tongues,
Your spirit of ambition and
your self-portrait of a day’s bruises,
Sadism and broken homes, your
camouflaged mirth.
Here, I lap up your shores,
back in my space
Between washed skins and
heaps of laundry, and write
A love poem for you,
remembering my suburban skin
And my ancestral ashes, the
dusky rivers traipsing in between.
*Pati Sapta: a Bengali
dessert
*Sankranti: A celebration of the transitioning
of the Sun into the Makara rashi (Capricorn) on its celestial path. An annual
festival in Bengal and the whole of India.
A powerful expression! Enjoyed reading it!
ReplyDeleteA powerful expression! Enjoyed reading it!
ReplyDeleteIt's beautiful
ReplyDeleteIt's beautiful
ReplyDelete