Poems rejected by The Statesman (Kolkata)

This morning even before I had had tea I went out to get a copy of The Statesman, as dad, the recipient of that paper in our house (I subscribe to 3 other newspapers, TOI & The Telegraph & Ananda Bajar Patrika), had instructed the boy not to deliver it till his return from his pilgrimage/holiday on 23rd Nov. The urgency was to check whether the poem that I had mailed to the paper last Sunday had been published. I was pissed off to see that it hadn't. But my daughter consoled me. She told me that now The Statesman couldn't attract any talent and possibly the person deciding on whether to accept my poem for publication was a graduate from Bangabashi College, which might be true. So here it is. I publish in this lovely instrument presented by modern technology and Google. So here it is.



Transmigration

I

Decades
Slipping between bodies in a bus, nine to five
Wiping his brow carefully lest the sweat
Drip onto other bodies
Pages turned reveal the same text, morning and evening
Petrolly dusks over dark skeletal houses across the road
Netted in tram wires, the same dirty slashes of blue or grey
Dusted with kites, as irrelevant flies, mornings too
Sunny, putrefying
Fortunate windows sometimes catching a gasp of wind.

And words.
Peanut shells of words
Arranged, re-arranged, urgently, endlessly.

Such decades

Suddenly flip over in the winds of time on the street
An expanding eternity of green, leathery, feathery
Branches languorously elongating in the sun
Spanning entire excited teenages right upto the sad doors of youth
Leaning out over the narrow strip of patched pitch
Glowing, carpet green above, mahogany underside.
Where time is measured in railway electric clocks.

Suddenly vistas expand, time expands
Beneath the Gainsborough dusks
The emptiness drones uninterrupted
Amid the going and coming of electricity
Entire evenings of a single candle on the window in a dusty room
Of a warped dusty table top and a cracked dressing table mirror
Framed in cobwebs.

Beneath the stretching branches
Leading to a distant forlorn round-about
A thick invisible swirling mass of absence roars
Sweeps you off, you take water, choke, splutter,
You try to expel the cold stone in your gullet,
To no avail

“It happens to everyone”
Your protestations that it’s so unnecessary
Chokes in your throat
You cry, choke, sink, swim
And are thrown onto a Saturday train
And later, breathe
Your feet on terra firma of your home city.


II

But your city.
Your city.
A dimension has slipped.
You pass through familiar streets
In a film.

Your home, your woman, your child
They are there
In two dimension

The mangled finger will not uncurl and touch
Visions of the inevitable darkness of Monday dawns
Slip in surreptitiously between your woman and you
And where are your ears
You miss out on the gurgling trivia of her week past
Hiding tribulations faced alone

And she is lost
The TV is no consolation.

III

Bit by bit pieces fall in place
The miracle of a late night movie
On television now permitted
Of the Sunday newspapers
After breakfast
Or a nap
Sunday mornings
From an unreal past
Are found between forgotten bills.

IV

Suburban afternoons
After a tender lunch, once unnoticed
Fade to an evening balcony
Over a home street of a past life.
Hurried packing and
The drink of forgetfulness
Jolts awake
To the arms on a cross at quarter to three
Though the trap door should have sprung
At quarter past four.

The prison van or a shared taxi
With other ghosts
Rushes over the dawning river
To another life
To the cacophony of similar birds
On the same platform
Waiting for the same train.

Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya