The new poem

Now for the new poem that I am so fond of . Its not so new, having been written in the first week of January this year. This poem is dedicated to Tanmay. I can't think of a name for it. Nor does every poem have to have a name. But if one were to give it a tag, lets call it 'Is' for the moment.

Is

Ashes float in the sunlight of the new rice
And the deep purple melancholy
That oozes from every pore of the earth
And congeals around the trunks of deceiving luminescent green
(leaping to low branches in evenings)

The empty cold wind turning
Turning on itself
And again
Floating on the new light of the new year
Can no more lead me astray
To her tripping alleys of pleasure
Of the mischievous running staircases to the terrace
Of skirts and knees and the warm surrender of laughter on my chest
Of her hair on my neck across her face of the salt of her kiss
Of the fullness of love.

No more.
For I who have traversed fifty cycles of the sun
Who has been drowned nine lifetimes
In the endless gutters of monsoon afternoons
Who has lost his steed and sword
And is condemned to ration queues for life
When on a wrong turn of the dice
Exchanged a Mohenjodaro of sighs
For the endless brook of her chitter chatter
Who in the endless wait for the yet unformed
Has watched kites as dusk condensed on her inconsolables.

Have worked it out (though not understood)
That only the light
Is.

Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya

More on Marriage

Yes. To continue with the marriage bit. The recent scandal about Mr.Spitzer was delicious. A high ranking politician in the US, from a rich, educated family, a law graduate, in short, a leader of the conservative society of the leading country of the world is caught with a prostitute! My. My. Isn't that something. The news reports show him (I couldn't find a better casting for the devil, sunken eyes and no eyebrows, jaws of a bulldog) and his wife, once pretty, vulnerable, open, just the sort of woman waiting to be taken for a ride by a hustler. And she was. She was persuaded not to practice law after she graduated from the same law school. And now look at her. She has to stand and be photographed beside her husband defending his right to go to a prostitute! That is marriage for you.

The second interesting bit of news is about the teenage British girl who was raped and killed in Goa and about which the Goa police initially said it was death due to drowning till her not too virtuous mother screamed foul from roof tops. The interesting bit is from the diary of the unfortunate girl, which was unearthed to put pressure on the mother who was accusing even the home minister of the State of complicity in suppressing the crime. The girl is sixteen and she says going without sex for more than two days stresses her out. Thats a truth society has never acknowledged. And has no solution to. That a teenager needs sex. There is no outlet for this strongest force in young people. Society has no solution and prefers to sit and pretend it doesn't exist and go about being mindlessly engaged in making money.

So we tell our children be a good boy and girl and in time you will find a good girl and boy. We tell them the virtues of virginity. You shall enjoy it more. It is sacred. Or else you will get Aids or worse. And show them hell and heaven. Keep quiet. Keep quiet. But the body will not be kept quiet. It needs sex just as it needs food.

But now for the poem promised in the previous post.

Love and Romance
Romance is in the dreams
Pleasure is in desiring
Togetherness
is summer rain.

The incomplete is complete
The unfulfilled fulfilled
The fulfilled wasted
It always ends in pain.

Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya

This was written in Dec., 1998. Now Amy Winehouse sings on a similar vein in 'Love is a Losing Game'.

Goldfish

Time
like a falling stone
through yellow green foliage
through sunlight of the liquor tea.
Feelings
half understood

After half a life
Sometimes
Pebbles on the stream bed.

Then
Life
is that love
as the gold fish.

(C) Copyright : Tapas Bandyopadhyaya

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