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| Laksmisree Banerjee |
ON THE OTHER SIDE
Stars lie buried in the sunshine
A revolve, a light, a darkness there
As my six becomes your nine
Beyond this there lies another sphere ---
The glow worms flying minuscules
Diadems of fire unawares
Spreading light in dotted capsules ---
As night tiptoes from the other side
The moon in shimmer also arrives
Day or night, nothing absolute abides---
My sun is your moon and stars
Your sun is my stars and moon
Will you look beyond your own swoon?
Can you ever see the whole rainbow?
Except the arched one so seasonal
Many harvests from many seeds phenomenal ---
The horizon makes the day meet night
My smiles hope not of your blight
My love or tears still not in your sight ---
Look the other side and this side too
As the twilight weds the seas and skies
Truth dawns and so does night ---
When was the part not a whole
Or the whole not a part?
Perspectives split can still merge ---
Look how the ring side
Is in sync with the other side
Look how the dark embraces light
With empathy and delight ---
***
I GROW IN DEATH
you split my tongue
you slit my throat
you slash my wings
you axe my foliage
you drink me dry ---
my silence is your delusion
my voicelessness
embers of my soul in rage
my body a cemetery
of speaking ashes in full bloom
you smell the purgatorial ambrosia
of my daring incensed fragrance ---
from Egypt to Indonesia
from Amazon to America
from Somalia to India
from England to Kenya
my trails of travails at home and abroad
make me red, green and pure gold
I revel in my firewood-pain
a ruptured spirit ever unfurling
my gullet cut resonates endlessly
a croaking frog dancing in the rain ---
my split tongue now
breeds poison of enchantment
the serpent of your creation
enamoring so many of you
perhaps a snapdragon ready to eat
a rose reincarnated as a gobbling cactus
spiky, unforgiving, a twisted cobra
sculpted through tyranny ---
as you cut so I grow
more you suck more I flow
you make me bleed
a river of the cold billows
my life eternal in death
as my skeletal branches flail
they splice you
lacerate you ---
I rise in my new vision
you fall in your remorseless illusion
my living death now my azure
I am the bird of love
a snake in the sky ---
***
SILENT SCREAM
Her scream has travelled long
through the hollows of ages
in the silence of whispering dogmas
A playful child she was at nine
with peals of laughter
enlivening her pink cheeks
Her dimples gleeful with her
clinking glass bangles holding
lovingly her slender wrists
The crackling jungles dim
the blossoming trees and foliage
all in sync with her quiet cries
While the foreboding heaved
deep within her childish bosom
with screams throttled by tradition
Soon her glass bangles broke
brittle like her silent crying heart
her whole self-enchained in gold
The young bride pushed into
an alien household with her wails
in subterranean folds of her trousseau
An under creeper wrenched out of
her soil for painful transplantation
her shrieks now deep as the ocean
No dearth of kith and kin or friends
no dearth of relationships half baked
in-laws, children, grand children
Her lord in sunny glory of triumph revamping her
Through decades, she in seeming command
as the screams pierce deeper into her loam
She remains forever the forgotten trophy
now a sudden horizontal marble white
the grand matriarch dressed up again
Her final journey as lavish, pallid and ashen
as that first one with gleams and screams
she the Ma Durga and her carcass floating now
Worship, immersion, festivity, facades
all drown fading into memories and births
of generations of women with silent screams
dying every instant with her fortitude of dreams
***
Prof. Dr. Laksmisree Banerjee is a Multiple Award-Winning Poet /Author, Literary Critic, Educationist, Editor and Practicing Radio & TV Vocalist with several National and International Publications, Assignments & Awards to her credit. She is an International Senior Fulbright Scholar, Commonwealth Scholar and National Scholar from the Calcutta University, a UGC Post-Doctoral Research Awardee and Former Vice Chancellor & Pro Vice Chancellor of Kolhan University, Eastern India. As a University Professor of English & Cultural Studies, Dr. Banerjee has lectured and recited in premier Universities of the world. She has Nine Books of Poetry (with Two more forthcoming) and One Hundred Twenty Academic Publications including Books. Among her several Awards, a few need special mention---- viz. she is the Recipient of Two International Awards for Lifetime Achievement in Art & Literature, International Panorama Award for Poetry, Kala Ratnam Award, Asian Literary Society Women Achievers’ Award, Connoisseur of Literary Arts of Asia & Tunisia Award, Literoma Laureate Award for Lifetime Achievement, Sahitya Akademi’s Avishkar Award as “a Scholar-Artiste & “Poet Musician”, the prestigious UGC Postdoctoral Research Award for her path-breaking Work on Comparative Studies of World Women Poets and many other Awards over the years An active Rotarian (Multiple Paul Harris Fellow) and a Former Nominee of the Indian Rashtrapati on several Central University Boards, Dr. Banerjee is passionate about using the potency of her Pen and Voice for Social Transformations and International Peace/Good.
Well written!
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