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| Sanjukta Dasgupta |
In search of peace
Sabre-rattling
Groans of drones
Zooming of bombs and bullets
Those divine teardrops
Glistening dewdrops
Heal the angry hungry earth
The calm ragged shawl of peace
Stretches itself like a desperate mother
Soothing the grumblings, rumblings
Crumbling of a sadist-masochist
Homicidal- suicidal suffering earth
Kurukshetra - the killing field
At midnight that night
The mother of a hundred dead sons
Looked up at the midnight blue sky
Crying out in futile protest
Raising her arms towards the azure tent
She wept, crumpled, destitute
The statuesque corpses
Of her one hundred sons
Strewn caveats, signposts of folly
Blood drenched, perhaps penitent
Now set to rest forever
Serene, calm, composed
Peace was restored at the price
Of rivers of blood
Sanity reinserted itself
Peace like a healing balm
Soothed the open wounds
At the gentle touch of restorative peace
The scorched and bloodied earth
Throbbed with the joy of resurrection
The green tender grass blades
Pierced through the enduring earth
Like flags of promise
Hailing a saner world.
Profile:
Dr. Sanjukta Dasgupta, Professor and Former Head, Dept of English and Former Dean, Faculty of Arts, Calcutta University and Fulbright Fellow. She is a poet, short story writer, critic and translator. She was a member of the General Council of Sahitya Akademi New Delhi and Convenor, English Advisory Board, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. She is the President of the Intercultural Poetry and Performance Library, Kolkata. She received the WE Kamala Das Poetry Award in 2020 and the ETHOS Literary Award in 2022.
Dasgupta has 26 published books. Her eight published books of poetry are Snapshots (1997), Dilemma (2002), First Language (2005), More Light (2009), Lakshmi Unbound (2017) Sita’s Sisters (2019) Unbound: New and Selected Poems edited by Jaydeep Sarangi and Sanghita Sanyal (2021), Indomitable Draupadi (2022). Her poems have been translated in German, Serbian, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Kashmiri and Tamil.
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