Basudhara Roy: Poetry (Voices Within 2021)

Basudhara Roy teaches English at Karim City College, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, India. As a poet and reviewer, her work is featured/upcoming in anthologies and magazines like The Helter Skelter Anthology of New Writing in English, The Aleph Review, The Kali Project, The Poetry Society of India, Mad in Asia Pacific, Teesta Review, Borderless, Muse India, Shabdadguchha, Cerebration, Rupkatha, Triveni, and Setu among others. Her first collection of poems Moon in My Teacup appeared from Writer’s Workshop in 2019, and her second collection, Stitching a Home, is forthcoming this year.

Years

 

The last time you spoke of ice,

I was knitting a shawl, beside

me a couple of scented promises

freshly lit, while in the kitchen,

 

the stew gurgled merrily for

dinner. Handing you a steaming

mug of coffee, I smiled. Sun-born,

heat-bred, what would I know of

 

ice, I said, except on the doorstep,

an excess of white? For a moment,

your eyes turned dark mirrors, your

mouth a sentinel of the night as you

 

tried to tell me of shadows’ braille

on fading light. But there was the

stew to taste and memory to be

refurbished from packed boxes

 

after which you quickly left. I

know ice now, the years having

taught me to shovel my way

through its heart. In my tropical

 

bosom, they have dug a resolute

place for it through spring and

summer so the next time you come,

this land, too, shall be home.

Circle

To feed your desperate hunger,

I reach within for rough handfuls

of my soul, offering words plentiful

like rushing grains of rice, tirelessly

accompanied by the fortitudinous

salt hills of my thought only to

realize that these will hardly suffice

tonight. You need somehow my

whole dark being, rude and raw as

you quietly gnaw flesh from bone,

every word of yours, a stone flung

in the eye. I try to break away,

claim freedom. You only shrug,

sure that I won’t know how to live

without a prison to wall me in. I

leave only to come back, certain

that death alone can break between

us this ruthless rhythm, this circadian

circle wherein you proprietorially

ask; I, forever grudgingly, give.

Reckoning

 

On an unfamiliar path

I pause amid ruins,

gather fallen leaves.

 

When clouds amass,

I make my way home

fervently hoping the

rains may come before

I reach. I have, all day,

been out in the open today,

talking to the wind nesting

in the clavicle of trees, the

hours clinging on to me,

resolute like lovegrass.

I have hoarded moments

in the heart’s piggy-bank

 

like loose change. I don’t

know, as yet, what they

are worth, for in all I do,

 

my pleasure only comes 

at my long day’s end,

from recounting it to you.

Epiphany

 

An age seems to

have passed

between yesterday

and today - terse,

definite, irrevocable

in its silence.

At my feet sleeps

a skin of my

former self,

an elegiac ecdysis

of pain. Was I

changed in a dream

or did I wake up

inhabited or could

I have been

dispossessed again?

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Life, Cognition and Creativity 2021 :: Setu, January 2021