Sabarna Roy: Poetry (Voices Within 2021)

Sabarna Roy is a much-awarded, critically acclaimed bestselling author of 6 literary books and 1 technical book, which has been translated into 8 major European languages. His 7th literary book: Fractured Mosaic will hit the markets in February, 2021.He was awarded the Literoma Laureate Award in 2019, Literoma Star Achiever Award 2020, Random Subterranean Mosaic: 2012 – 2018 won the best book of the year 2019, the A-List Award for excellence in fiction by the NewsX Media House, Certificate for The Real Super Heroes for spreading a spirit of positivity and hope during the COVID-19 Pandemic from Forever Star India Award 2020, the Certificate for Participation in the Indo Russian Friendship Celebration 2020, and the Literoma Golden Star Award 2020: Lifetime Achievement.

Poem-1

I look at the starlit horizon

The fine gravelly quartz balls trickle down by gravity monotonously from the upper cone of the hour-clock

An allergic hissing sound creeps inside your eardrums: Time is running away

You feel three crimson balloons leave your soul up in the air 

They float; you look at them

Your wife plays rummy with her lovers at Cafe Kali

Your kids are cool dudes: They watch Kanan Gill and Trevor Noah on Netflix and laugh their hearts out in their star-lit rooms

You have wasted your life where you have lost the capacity to love and be loved

It is not the strangeness of loneliness

It is the inertia and peace of a dimensionless numbness

That you are at peace with yourself 

You feel no anxiety, no agony, no pain

You remember your days of youth with small shots of morphine

From Neelanjan, who studied at the Calcutta Medical College

For happy bursts of sleep

You now wish for morphine so that you could dive inside an unending blackness

To avoid the starlit horizon

To avoid the allergic hissing sound of the hour-clock

To avoid the balloons leaving your soul

The fever shoots up, and you sweat 

As your eyelids kiss, your ears echo with crooning screams of Monisha reaching you from miles away

Who blamed you for writing hopeless trash of loathing and self-pity 

And left you to marry Neelanjan, the city's top-most gynecologist and obstetrician

Monisha herself a top-class anesthetist

The fever shoots up, and you sweat 

You have lost the zest for life, as Abani da, your mentor, would tell you

Who would also warn you that you were born with a feeble heart and no appetite for life

Possibly because you were born two months ahead of time

The fever shoots up, and you sweat

You look at the starlit horizon with hope

For Abani da advised you to live with slivers of hope 

A man should never allow despair to win over hope in times of personal and public calamity

You try to remember the time-ravaged face of Abani da 

Who adorned a mystic smile 

Like those inflated crimson balloons that left your soul 

The fever shoots up, and you sweat

I look at the starlit horizon

The fine gravelly quartz balls trickle down by gravity monotonously from the upper cone of the hour-clock

An allergic hissing sound creeps inside your eardrums: Time is running away

***

Poem-2

The rains, nowadays, remind me of the grasslands of childhood

The unending water-logged fields spread across the horizon

The beauty of naked adolescent boys 

Nascent muscular torsos entwined in motion 

Pacing and swerving a wretched football 

Against the friction of water and blades of uneven grassy growth

Pools of mud

Sheets of water falling from the sky

Speeding drenched cheetahs as if in a choreographed wild opera

In slow motion 

The last move and then a shooting volley inside the goal

Hands thrown up in joy 

Applause rocking and roaring as a bolt of massive thunder 

Divides the universe into two teams

One that wins and the other that does not 

The drenched cheetahs run again for another goal

Images ravaged by time float through my mind like ancient cinema 

Aging is reaching tranquillity 

Aging is getting plundered by the pain of memories of other worlds

***

Poem-3

Sandy got up inside his dungeon: smelly riff-raff

Another dawn

Shining darkness on broken stones

Tired

Thirsty 

Loveless

Another dawn

Sandy crawls out and attempts to stand up

To look at the strange sky

This sky

And, the arid road has been with him for a lifetime

He lost his mother

His father

His brother 

On the road 

Sandy cries 

The salt in his teardrops on his tongue reminds him of an ocean:

Of his childhood

Sandy starts his day walk

The agility returning to his warped skeleton gradually:

With his sack on his hunchback 

He is driven by a dream of a field blooming with pumpkins 

That he wants to harvest, own, and eat

And sleep among pumpkins and die while the wind blows through him

***

NH 44

My hands

Calloused, weathered, and beaten

By sowing seeds

During Kharif and rabi 

In soils – hot and frozen

Hydrated and desiccated

Forever against the coldness of the cosmos 

I have provided stale food on the rusted iron plate of an impoverished soul

I have provided gourmet cuisine on the ornate cutlery of oligarchs 

Tonight I stand on the highway with my comrades 

The night sky invisible in the fog 

The fire that we lit to beat the freeze burns with a mystic halo 

The government –middlemen of oligarchs – do not listen to us with empathy 

For they do not understand what soil, air, and water have taught us

Why is it that I who produce rice; with passing years, can no longer afford to eat any more rice

Why is it that I who produce pregnant oranges; with passing years, can no longer afford to taste a slice

In the name of policies, you hurl bombs at me

Unburden tear gas and water cannons when I raise my voice

Do not push me back beyond the wall that my spine bends against the steel of concrete

And, I am forced to take up torches of fire and throw them at you where I know you, and your cronies will burn and melt

I tear your larger-than-life-flag under which you want my unfailing loyalty and trust

I go berserk, amok like a rabid dog

And, sting at you, and all your likes

Who are compradors of oligarchs

I know it will become easier for you to encounter-finish my body in the name of self-defense

My friend, Sandy: the poet, who told me there is no meaning to life and is otherwise a social misfit

Tells me tonight it feels wonderful to stand by a pulsating crowd engulfed in vaporous condensation dripping like rain in slow motion

A discotheque of life playing out on the highway on a winter night

---

Life, Cognition and Creativity 2021 :: Setu, January 2021

Sabarna Roy (Voices Within)

Sabarna Roy is a First Class Honors Civil Engineering Graduate from Jadavpur University [1988]. He is presently employed at Electrosteel Castings Limited, Kolkata as Senior Vice President [Business Development] of the Group. He has published five literary books since 2010 covering different genre: Pentacles, Frosted Glass, Abyss, Winter Poems and Random Subterranean Mosaic:2012 -2018 Time Frozen in Myriad Thoughts. His books are major critical and commercial successes. He has also authored a Technical book titled: Articles on Ductile Iron Pipelines and Framework Agreement Methodology, which is a compilation of nine technical papers published in peer-reviewed National and International Journals.

Untitled Poem 1

The sweet rush of death

Through the winter rains

From the pacing waters of Ganga flowing along Banaras city

From the burning pyres on one embankment

From the small dunes of sand on the other

From the rotting steel of an ancient bridge

The scent of shameless youth and life are gone

The sweet rush of death, all over

Do not listen to me: For I have no hope to give

Mainak, who is dying by the hour

Is strapped to his bed with tumors in his stomach

Refusing medication and hospitalization

A no to live by artificial means

He holds my hands with his frail long fingers

An artist of epic murals – crisscrossing the globe, a few years back

Metropolitan railway stations, bulbous airports and heritage sites

Locking my hands to his, urging me to tell him

Sinuous stories of cops and goons

He listens attentively and then dozes off to pale sleep, lightly snoring

Outside, on the streets

The cymbals and drums are playing

The students might uproot this deathly government

The sweet rush of death, all over in my mind

In the evenings, I walk to the Cantonment area

Woods, grasslands, bougainvillea, ponds and golf carts

Some rest, coffee, sandwiches and then, back to Mainak

The sweet rush of death lingers in my mind

In a few days, Mainak will be gone

Memories, murals and unfinished artwork are all that will be left

Of this ferociously handsome man, once upon a time

The sweet rush of death

The sounds of cymbals and drums

The roaring sounds of youth all over 

Untitled Poem 2

The scent of my city changes during the winters

Children – with tennis-ball-like-cheeks – from schools go to picnics with their boisterous teachers in colorful dresses with homemade delicacies trapped inside Chinese tiffin boxes – aroma of egg and chicken rolls

Aroma of perfumes and talcum powder floating from their teachers’ bodies

Lovers meet around curated water-bodies and exchange colorful, blooming flowers

The old go for longer morning walks oblivious of their splitting knee pain; ending the sojourn with a cup of steaming syrupy milk tea, shingaras and jalebis

The rich have parties at Clubs, Banquets, Lawns and 5 Star Resorts

They have very different colors, scents and noises – inaccessible and mysterious

The shine on their cars is another thing to watch

My city is also teeming with

Hopeless, unemployed, starving and mentally challenged people

Their faces and destinies crisscrossed with scars

They shiver in the winters and go on shivering till they freeze

They have very little access to shelter – blankets and quilts, water, and food

They decay in their relentless thirst and hunger – the stench goes up to the sky

I do not know what to do in the winters

Whether to join the children, the lovers, the old, the rich or the disenfranchised

I go my way – through the suburban shrubs and sit the whole day along a secret pond with my fishing net, sunshine warming up my shoulders and back, waiting for my frugal catch – and, in the evening go to Baba’s house to oil-fry my catch for Baba so that he could devour them gradually with his single peg of Jack Daniele

I read out Osip Mandelstam to him – some lines he can hear; some lines he cannot

When I bid him farewell, he holds me forcefully in his embrace and croons in my ears –

This winter will pass

Untitled Poem 3

In the unending fields of mustard – sprawling vineyards

On a narrow embankment of mushy soil

I dig up a trench with a spade and a pickaxe

Very deep

Very dark

It takes a full day to prepare the trench with bed of leaves – moist and dried

Collected in the adjacent jungles in the preceding days tirelessly

There are some bread loaves and marmalade

The quilt with embroidered print of deer and peacocks playing in the woods

Was stitched by my paternal grandmother

Night oozes out of the sky

Darkness struggling with the yellow haze emanating out of the

The fields of mustard brought to life, as if by a celestial magic wand

I enter my trench

Eat some loaves with marmalade

Pull the quilt over my body

And, look up at the sky

I feel intoxicated by the sighting of stars, planets and moons – galaxies and constellations

It reminds me of my days of working as a spy

For states with multiple faces and faceless states

The cemeteries of Tokyo in skyscrapers

The brothels of Zurich

My lazy journeys from London to Cotswold

My lazy journeys from Paris to Giverny

The serrated rooftops of Istanbul

The breakfast shops in Lower Manhattan

Then the darkness of Congo, Sudan and the forests of Bastar in India

A strange light in my trench – a concoction of the night’s darkness

And, the light glowing and melting out of the innumerable flowers of mustard

I look up at the sky

Tokyo is falling

Zurich is falling

London is falling

Paris is falling

Istanbul is falling

New York is falling

Strange fires spreading across Congo, Sudan and India

I inject a shot in my veins and look at dilapidated cities – their ruins

Playing in the magical light of the fields of mustard

Fires playing in the distance on the cinemascope of the night sky

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Voices Within-2020 :: Setu, February 2020