Lopa Banerjee's Poems
A Memoir Springs Out of Nowhere
(1)
Faltering, stumbling
Unlettered years
The promise of a runny fish curry
The promise of a puja with rituals learnt
With stale flowers refreshed
Unexpected Decembers
In search of a home where reunions never happen anymore.
A memoir springs out of nowhere.
Starting in the damp courtyard where it was all a child’s play—
Worshipping the false Gods, rhythmic reminders in shrines,
Learning about primal yearnings
And the smell of burning incense,
Shaking the dust from truant feet.
(2)
A memoir springs out of nowhere—
From the storm churning in the nomad mind,
From the deceased mother’s recipes of shaak bhaja
And the reminders of brewing it all well,
The ripples of salt and the landscape of Bengali tongue,
The yin and yang of teapots and pressure cooker.
A memoir springs out of nowhere—
From the body where the first clods of red earth appeared
To the body that rained, frosted and then thawed again,
between continents.
From the sweaty hands, losing control over
the verdant staircases of girlhood,
and the alien steering wheels.
(3)
The scent of New York, Texas, Nebraska, Kansas,
Florida, California, Arkansas
The colors and strokes of four walls, of makeshift hotel stays.
Metamorphosis of storms and crisp skies
breaking up into home, shelter, refuge.
A memoir springs out of nowhere—
From the urgency of kilometers
to the stoic acceptance of miles,
From the night shifts in between transits
to the smudged settling in adopted homes.
Shaak Bhaja: A Bengali delicacy of spinach stir-fried with eggplants and Indian spices.
Sun Temple, Konark
January 2020
When the rocks and the divine sculptures engraved in them breathe poetry,
Do you need the aid of verses in concocted words?
When divinity spells its untainted songs in a mosaic of figurines,
Quaint and mighty in the same breath,
Do you need the Gita, the Bible, the holy Quran?
When Prakriti and Purusha, the elemental man and woman
Converge in a volcanic ocean of wants,
Do you need any other melody, a divine rhapsody of some other form,
More voluptuous, eroding your senses, your faith in all-encompassing love?
Konark, am I your courageous, piercing need,
Your bursting sunshine, the wrenching pain of centuries when you evolved?
Am I the spurious birth of a dream in the palm of your hands
As the world breaks open in a thwarted call for a revolution?
Am I the evening prayer of the woman in her high tide,
Or the bitter, twisted lies that she wraps around her to feed parochial urges?
I keep my bejeweled tears,
the depth of my bosom,
the womb of my history
At your feet, and leave you for now.
Let me come back to you again in another lifetime, years old and starving.
Let me come back as revolutions keep brewing,
As you wax and wane, explode fiercely, wrenching out smiles,
Your unclipped verses of freedom.
The Unforgiving Rain
[My small poetic tribute to torchbearers and dreamers, women who dared to dream, unforgiving and unwavering, no matter what their ancestral histories have taught them.]
Thump, thump, thump,
The colicky dreams rise, unforgiving
Burst open against the swallowing silence of nihilism.
Instantaneous, uncowering
In heat, dust and sweat, the drumbeats go on
As they dance on the edge, avalanches of unforgiving blasphemy.
The unforgiving rain
The sister storms in the wooded trails
Know their mettle. They’ve stayed in place for thousand years.
Forgiveness is saintly.
But only the unforgiving queens know that to be humane,
They would wriggle themselves into the arms of an unapologetic thunder.
Smelling of blood
And a wasteland of stories of forebearers forgiving every grain
Of perpetual sin, they unleash the unforgiving showers and the world gives in.
All Rights Reserved. Lopa Banerjee. June 17, 2021
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