Poetry: Radha Chakravarty

Radha Chakravarty

In Your Eyes a River

[To my father’s village Shyamsiddhi]

 

You never left Shyamsiddhi.

In your heart you carried a home,

in your eyes a river, in the soles your feet,

the swing and shift of a bamboo sanko,

narrow bridge of precarious crossings,

in seasons when you were not a-swim

in the rain-swollen canal circling

that mound, the lost ground of your birth,

forsaken foundation of your fast-transforming self,

and absent source of mine.

 

Past towering Shyamsiddhi Math,

crossing lush green fields of memory,

flourishing on the soil of old tales retold,

I traverse, now, the trail you took

on sunburnt days, to Srinagar school, clutching

slate, chalk, and shining boyhood dreams,

unaware that the highway of history

is a one-way route to the point of no return.

 

Across that same swaying sanko I step, now,

forward and back, into your past and mine,

searching opaque green water for signs,

scanning cloud-laden sky for answers.

The climb is slippery. Mud can be treacherous.

Helping hands draw me ashore, to the present.

 

My questing soul kneels before

the starkness of your truth. Face to face

with the very spot where your story began,

bearing hidden future seeds of mine,

awed by stark simplicity of hut, yard,

well, sky and bottle-gourd vine,

green sway of banana leaves

and palm tree’s shaggy grace,

Here, I hear the heartbeat of the past,

feel the pulse of my present.

The silence of the listening earth is deafening.

Beneath the gaze of that same new and ancient sky,

I stand face to face with your impossible story,

and find at last the missing opening lines of mine.

 

[Note: This poem is addressed to my father, whose family migrated to Kolkata from their village Shyamsiddhi in East Bengal (now Bangladesh), just before Partition.

sanko: Bengali word for a narrow bamboo footbridge.]

***

 

Cut Flowers

Roses in a vase

stems cut to size, arranged

in formal symmetry, designed

to please the cultivated gaze,

to match the stately grace

of ritual social pageantry

 

still

fill the air

with fragrant defiance,

of forbidden memory—

 

that forsaken garden,

familiar thorny branch,

wildness of the wind,

smell of moist earth,

hum of the honey bee

dazzle of sunshine,

tender caress

of dewdrops at dawn, and

the whimsy

of butterflies

***

 

Driftwood dreams

 

stranded on a strange new shore

driftwood dreams of home—

that familiar forest, that deep-rooted tree,

that growing, branched family

of ancient lineage, lush with leaves,

new shoots, blossoms, slowly ripening fruit,

filled with birdsong, echoing calls

of creatures of the wild,

growing living history, now lost

in the toss and churn of ocean waves,

tides of time, indifferent

to the fate of un-homed migrants

***

 

Bio: Radha Chakravarty is a widely published writer, critic and translator. Subliminal: Poems is her recent collection of poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She contributed to Pandemic: A Worldwide Community Poem (Muse Pie Press, USA), nominated for the Pushcart Prize 2020.  She has published over 20 books, including translations of major Bengali writers, anthologies of South Asian writing, and critical studies of Tagore, Mahasweta Devi and contemporary women writers. She was Professor of Comparative Literature & Translation Studies at Ambedkar University Delhi.

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Setu, July 2024