Poems - Lakshmisree Banerjee
Time
Is it a cradle
swinging in the void
humming a
lull-a-by to
the ever joyful
the ever crying
baby of life
now awake
now asleep?
Is it a pendulum
between two eternities
ceaselessly ticking
on the listless
glassy face of
old grandfather
on the wall
moving yet
motionless
for centuries?
Or is it a chugging
train
sometimes whistling
sometimes speedily
quiet
but always
beating the
perennial rhythm
of a journey?
Or is it perhaps
the hollow
ghostly skull of
a ravaged home
burnt down
with riotous hate
yet static like
an open mouth
after being throttled
to death on
a blood-stained
page of history?
- 2 –
Or is it the chiming
footsteps
of wavering in
distressed separation
searching for
the lost lover
in a deep dark forest
across the
never ending
prickly path of
seething scents in
simmering flames
hoping to be
quenched with love?
Or is it a green
olive tree
or perhaps a saal
peepul, banyan
or mahua
or trees standing still
with full-grown hibiscus
palash or red oleanders
moving yet not so
as I move on
sitting tight
on my seat
in a running bus?
What is time?
Where is time?
does it flow
in my veins
or down the river?
or is it my
thumping heart-beat
waiting to go
to the other side
to meet my maker?
Moon - Spindles of Singhbhum
Weaving cane baskets
darning rags
making coconut-brooms
sun-drying dung cakes
for stoking half-dead fires
wrapping up crack’d huts
with muddy slime
along denuded roads
is what they know of
as destiny …….
the dented coal-tar
the beaten corn
the wheat in meagre spread-outs
on the margins of highways
compose their lives…….
their nude children
progenies of darkness
kick on the outskirts
away from life, light
or digital development…….
their black burnish’d bodies
marvellous oily statuettes
used for hard sun-burnt labour
picking up firewood
or dry, half-rotten fruits
in deep, pachyderm-infested jungles …….
for back-breaking chores
in devastated fields, farms or homes
for leasing themselves out
to lazy, lascivious males,
owners or husbands
in liquor-stupor.
The moon steadily blinks
on these tired horizons
of Singhbhum or Simlipal
of Bethla or Bamnipal
yarning herstories
on an eternal spindle.
Haria
Haria is not allowed
to cross our threshold
or enter the thirty three million
doors of our gods.
He can hardly combat
deceit.
His dreamy eyes clouded, dark, are
folded and supplicant like
the green, timid under-creeper.
The brooms of cactus-life
help him to clean our dirt with
the breath of a hopeful vigilance
for a simple flash of instant salvation
with a lurking fear of a ruthless eternity
of god knows what,
never leaving his heart.
He sweeps our outside verandahs, porches,
the dusty pathways, the lavatories,
cleans our sullied bins and grimy cesspools,
frittering away his doomed hours
on the dim margins of hope
which never arrives.
Our Brahmin cook with
a noose of a sacred thread
around his neck,
pounds painful thunders on him
driving him away like a street dog.
Peahen Passions
To make my small point
I do not need to flirt with
Your fanned, oversized, ruffled,
Exotically anarchic, coloured feathers
On your empty crown.
My grace talks, walks,
States and remains stable with
My puny, almost invisible top-knot
Riding on a formidable foothold
Of regal infinitude.
The sense-blurring beauty
Of corn-strewn, dusty tracks,
The green aesthetics of
The torn foliage and mud around me
Make my statement.
The muffled hues of my world,
My dainty, wobbling gait
With a sureness of trodding
Despite the slime and dirt sucking me in,
Have an intensity, a conviction.
If you care to soothen
Your great, chaotic headgear
You may perhaps, still see
The revelling leaves in the storm,
Still feel the bliss of pot-holed roads
Or the laughing oysters merging in love
With the endless equity
Of the seas.
Love Lies
I have tasted it for real
but it was always splendidly fake,
its meat, colour and flavour,
luscious in the scent of its madness,
inviting me to its stale perjury,
It was spicy, marinated, roasted, deliciously laid out
with crushed, seasoned juices almost gone dry.
I have danced with the limp
of its lisping lyricism,
lapping up the wild, straw-berried ice cream
in its splashes of glow worms
dying sequin- moments across the grey skies.
Its full-blown rose, heady, inebriate and beauty-laden,
always falling with tearful bubbles to the ground,
worthy of a memorial service.
It was as if the genuineness of its dreams
had spruced up with greenness my sleeping fervour -----
but it never finally did !
Its imagined truth never did arrive
but it always did live in the temporal flights
of ascending birds and sprightly fancies
invaded and struck down periodically
by the startling arrows of the unknown
black hunter.
Its dark joys glistened forever on
the mountains and mirrors-----
Potent and fragile like Lucifer,
revelling in his painted lies like Life
breathing in the warm sun of the charade
of its cosy night-corner, Love remains
ever-thirsty in the casualty of its own mirage.
Unborn Kill
I felt my throbs
deep within
the frothy warmth of
my mother’s insides.
I was she -----
a teardrop on the serrated edge
of being,
a dew on her hidden, clement leaf
soon to be sucked out by
the boiling seas, the hot winds
of prejudice -----
I am not sure when
or how my mother
loved or wept -----
not sure whether
it was a blunder, a crime,
an accident
or perhaps moral turpitude -----
But sure enough
I wept with her in pain
while my instant was
blotted out under
the dark arc lights
in an ageless cry.
Nirbhaya (On the Night of 16th December,2012)
her voice awakens us
a thumping soft echo rings in our bonded hearts
a falling star, an erupting timelessness
despite the hooded darkness
her sparkling absence
becomes our magic wand
on the road to freedom
she is here and now
she is you and me
within and around
she is everywhere
across and beyond the rainbow
underground and overground
our Durga, our Lakshmibai, our resurrected Christ
she ignites my question, your question
the question of countless Indians
wailing against that hapless Midnight
of our tryst with destiny
the ardour of a thousand blazing moons
the sprouting greenery after her shrieks
have ended myriad bleeding struggles
have sanitized our skies and seas
we are joined in worship
to redeem her unafraid tremor
resolved again to seek answers
Nirbhaya’s sleeping voice is sleepless today
with the lurking beasts still preying through
our streets, our homes, our very own spaces
our cacti-forests are on fire
our ravaged gardens seek justice
our aridities yearn for Nirbhaya’s
cool clear water
we face each other, for each other
linked in this encounter of
prayer with folded hands
in a caravan of peace
to the promised land
perhaps to arrive or never to,
with Nirbhaya’s surging symphony
her fuelling soul hopes for a new dawn
amid the outrage against
that celebrated Midnight of
Mahatma’s India
The God I Know
I have known him
in the cerulean shadows
of my dreams.
I have felt him
in the gnawing pulse
of my desperations:
I have drunk him
through the clenched roots
of my moist, muddied soul:
I see him often
beaming through the countless
faces of
my feelings,
my fears,
my hopes,
my tears -------
I often touch
his fleshy, ardent pinkness
through stretches of
my deepest sleep,
through the soul of
my hardest awakening.
I have heard this god of mine
through the midnight intensities
of joys unknown,
through the cacophony of living,
in the flappings of my free lines
in the sonority of my heart.
Life is the only god I know,
ever-loving,
ever-treacherous,
a splendid Krishna
ever-shifting,
a magic serenade
lilting through
the mirage of my golden screen.
Snapshots
ONE AND OTHER
While snowflakes
melt into my heart -----
I see the largeness of the sky,
the smallness of the bee -----
the blue infinitude and
the buzzing dot of honey -----
Why measure
the One against the Other ?
REST
I am in
the eye of the storm:
Look how it stops
to rest
in Me.
SELF
I saw her in the forest,
small, serrated, assailed,
a bleeding bloom entrenched
in her heart.
She looked for a cover
within me.
ISTHMUS
Masses lie
disjointed,
clouds, lands, woods,
islands of snow,
mirror shards -----
Watch there
the green isthmus growing,
conjoining with
the Limitless.
CHIAROSCURO
I am the Hibiscus,
the Water-Hyacinth too -----
I often add up
my colour and scent,
the mahua1 melody of Tune
with the tulsi2 rhythm of Word
in flower-full waters:
Look at
my chiaroscuro.
ROSEWAY
See how life
moves
down the roseway,
despite
the lesion, the canker,
falls asleep with
the lorie3 of pain
and rises to
the eyelids of the dawn.
CHILD
I gave her life
from seedy, unkempt agony -----
Look how she blossoms
to the sunlight,
my balm and cure.
