Poetry: Lopamudra Banerjee

Lopamudra Bannerjee

Melancholy

My language of melancholy is a solitary wisp of air.

Do not leave her alone—I pray.

She can’t sever the morning from the night,

Her whole universe is an evening raga, spread out

like a dusky, twilight-colored skirt.

Beneath the bark of the familiar oak or maple tree, she whispers

like a soft, unnamed trance, or lies unceremonious

in nameless corners of nondescript train stations,

wrapped in a tattered blanket, hiding her wordless trails. 

Or else, one can trace her footsteps as she trudges

Uncaring, nonchalant on the rusty railway tracks,

She scampers on the colorless city streets,

her raw wounds unattended to.

My language of melancholy is a solitary strain of melody,

Do not leave her alone—I pray

Do not leave her--amid faceless entities

in nondescript train stations,

in the eccentric hollow spaces between the jungle of high-rises.

Who knows, she might encounter

a strange cacophony of other anonymous melancholy languages

and die of despair, gushing deep within!

***

Stories: A Reverie

Stories of a chunk of quivering fall air

Stories of crinkled bodies and warrior hearts

And the epic tales of foremothers

in our slivered tongues.

Stories of forbidden evening smells

Hovering in our breath, the resounding

of panting noises of fleeing territories

Through the thorns of barbed-wire fences.

Stories of soaking our tattered alphabets

in our bloodstream, grilling our ancestors’ breaths

in the blistering heat of our hearths, stories that sprout

from the love of piercing, ill-nurtured closures.

Stories of our subaltern realities and mangled memories

Stories of our myths that shape our smoldering fire,

Stories like these live and breathe in our contours,

In our quiet rivers, their sudden undulations.

Stories of womanhood and its myriad travails

Stories flowing like gushing cascade

in my veins, in my bloodstream

Ushering from the birth canal of my consciousness.

***

Sanity

Shunning the vices of elocution and the putrid salt of poetry

My mind wanders in the ‘light’

of self-proclaimed gatekeepers of sanity.

Sanity

Where art thou? In the clipped wings of words where eloquence dies

A thousand black deaths

in one single stroke of garrulousness?

Where art thou? In the crooked path of abundance with the herd serenading apathy?

Fiction and nonfiction play hopscotch in the nameless corridors of my mind

And yet, my clogged self seals their destiny in my inner consciousness.

Only that day i was re-reading ‘The Bell Jar’,

and Sylvia’s wondrous textures of ‘insanity’,

the flesh and blood of her alternate realities were gripping me, in my sinew and bones, i smelt ‘treacherous word play.’

Only that day, the bolted doors of word wizardry was almost bound to open

When in a video interview, Roy was bursting the bubbles

created around masterful depictions

of her vision of truth surrounding

Her Mother, her declaration of Love

And Lovelessness.

And then, that day, the news, the ushering of empowering wishes for the Nobel prize winning Lazslo Krasznahorkai and his coveted novel

Affirmed that ‘brave and startling truths’

Would perhaps bring me back

To the beacon of hope

To the affliction for perceptive images

To the ethereal call of ‘the gab.’

In the unabashed daily grind and the rigmarole of the night

A hundred witchcraft acts with reading and interpreting

With missing puzzles and sorcery of words,

‘Shabda’, the ‘Brahma’ or the Universe

Loosen their grip and hang, astray.

Sanity? Where do I search for thee?

In the badlands of infinite darkness,

in this limbo between

art and embodiments—

I am cursed a thousand times,

I am blessed a thousand times.

*Roy: Arundhanti Roy, author of the recently acclaimed book ‘Mother Mary Comes to Me’ and other several critically acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction.

*Lazslo Kranzsnahorkai: Hungarian author, Man Booker Prize Winner, Nobel Prize Winner for Literature in 2025.

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Setu, November 2025