Probal Basak (Voices Within)

Probal Basak, 31, from India, started his career as a journalist working with Press Trust of India, Business Standard covering mostly socio-political issues. Currently employed as an officer with Department of Information & Cultural Affairs, Government of West Bengal, he writes poetry and his recent works have been published in journals like Dissident Voice, New Verse News, Spillwords, Setu.

A Dead Kingdom

         

She was dead before they noticed she was dying.

They brought a defibrillator –

cannons of water to sprinkle and tear gas to breathe.

They operated, defibrillator kept changing hands

       between the who’s who.

Like a solitary guardrail trying to stop a coup.

At funeral there was no one mourning, only fiery slogans

grieving the market crash –

slogans to put up barbed fencing securing their hatred.

They gathered, screamed – everything at royal behest

         that protest can’t undo.

Like a forsaken bandage that blood oozed through.

Stateless

She is a careless scribbling on the map

but she refuses to accept it.

Not when the lung starts to squeeze

and they stamp on the wings

that silently gets clipped.

Not when the idle wheel on flag runs away

to ferry forgotten stateless tears

that touches no cheeks.

Not when tired legs of barbed fence

long for a leisure walk locking fingers

that no one holds.

She is a careless scribbling and

she refuses to accept it.

When someone tries to erase the lines

she summons the night owls

and they lock her in the cage.

Shelling

Busy fingers of a rough hand making the sound of silence

slip into familiar groove to pry them open with patience, 

I see the green peas, losing their weak pod shell defence, 

are kept in the frying pot amid odour of burning incense.

More and more hands, more and more fingers join to shell

And there, a hidden pea moth, for whom they were on trail,

Gets plucked. Alas, the addicted fingers can’t see, can’t smell,

I see the worm taking all the green peas along to the hell.

---

Voices Within-2020 :: Setu, February 2020

Probal Basak

Probal Basak, 31, from India, started his career as a journalist working with Press Trust of India, Business Standard covering mostly socio-political issues. Currently employed as an officer with Department of Information & Cultural Affairs, Government of West Bengal, he also writes poetry and his recent works have been published in journals like Dissident Voice, News Verse News, Setu. 

Authors A-Z

Poetry: Probal Basak

Probal Basak

An Old Dream

An old tired dream
came to the condemned corner
inside my barbed homeland,
crossing over piles of dead nightmares
tinkled ivories, held my hand.

We swapped stories,
stories of his dreamland
and stories of my homeland,
a land that now scares me.
They summon the dead,
to judge their flaws,
they comb my plate
for pieces of broken laws,
they take my pants down
to know how I pray,
they seek to taste my blood
to allow me to stay.

Scared silent dream
let go off my hands, disappeared
without a fight,
and, I rushed back to the camp
to throttle nightmares
one at every night.
***


Horror of Lights

In a not so ordinary day
someone somewhere somehow
trumped up the plan
to wake the kingdom up from
primitive darkness under its hood.

The kingdom woke up to lights,
too much lights around, and
it craved for even more
like the colony of beetles
flying to the smoldering wood.

Our world continued its walk
into the horror of lights until
the addicted eyes lost eyesight,
and, the blind kingdom laid an egg,
unlike the one the firebugs brood.

Setu, December 2019

Poetry: Probal Basak

Probal Basak

WALL

Hate goes on
building wall,
fuelling battle of
Yahweh and Ba’al.

Starved bellies
caught in trawl.
hundred stateless
queued to scrawl.

splits a mother
and her child,
my, my country
names me wylde.

Pecksniffs around
on a diktat-spree,
seeks piece of paper
to set me free.


Let the SAGE
whisper to despotic laity.
Let HIM
Unlock the cage.
Awake
The deluded deity.
Lighten up
The dark chasm.

AYANGBANDHU RAYANETI
GANANA LAGHUCHETASM
UDARCHINTNANG TU
BASUDHAIVA KUTUMBAKAM.
***


Au Revoir

(In first week of June 2018, leading dailies published a painting recovered from 5-year old Jose, separated from his father who had been arrested at El Paso border, courtesy US administration’s border enforcement policy. This piece is inspired by Jose’s story)

Hello, Jose. Do you hear me?
You are not alone.
Keeping pain at bay,
fight. We’ll be back, don’t moan.
World will raise voice in our plea,
may be, one day.

Jose, I saw your drawing.
The one, published in paper.
Memory came back clawing;
Mom’s long hair, my father
standing beneath the sunny sky
and my tiny sister with her
hair-band with butterfly.
Hey, Jose, Is it you,
smiling and holding my hand?
Did you ever come to my land?

Pain, may be our pain have
travelled thousands of miles
to Ichamati bank, crossing the knoll.
resisting rulers’ wiles,
united El Paso and Petropole.

May be, the solitary fates
stringing a garland of
our memoir.
Good byes, forced the state,
but, we said to our loved ones
au revoir.
***


After The Wall

Inside the wall:
it’s a rising wall.
Country
going ball to the wall,
bouncing off the wall,
firm on raising a barbed wall.

Outside the wall:
it’s a tearing wall.
Countrymen
beating head against the wall,
pushing hope back to the wall
facile, left to be fly on the wall.

It’s a wall to wall off
stateless from state
brick by brick,
hate by hate.

----------------
Probal Basak, 31,  an allumni of IIMC, New Delhi, India started his career as a journalist, who worked with Press Trust of India, Business Standard reporting mostly on socio-political issues.

Currently working with Department of Information & Cultural Affairs, Government of West Bengal in India, he writes poems both in English & Bengali (mothertongue).

Setu, November 2019