Revisit: What's New, What's Old? (Gopal Lahiri)

Newness

Ashes rise, flutter in the day break, lost lives return in memories.

Now the sun floating in the vacuum, the dying of the year

the sky turns from amethyst to pale auburn,

hesitant, fleeting, even illusory,

The unready eye of the green countryside

haunts the spine of the rock,

Gopal Lahiri

Twilight skies spread out on a silken canvas.

River beds are strewn with debris and unknown bodies,

dark moments tend to slip away,

Each one of us stands before the flickering flame

from these shades of grey and grey, in the end

the moving lamps light the shadow.

You don’t know what is there and also is

the blackness of the space.

The random hands, the curious looks ready to

build the wall of dreams.

The time lives through, all of us there,

none of us there in the changing landscape.

We dream another sun, newness, magic realism

at every year end.

***

Bio: Gopal Lahiri is a bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator with 23 books published, including five jointly edited books. His poetry is also published across various anthologies as well as in eminent journals of India and abroad. His poems are translated in 16 languages. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2021.

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Setu, December 2021