Ritwika Bandyopadhyay's Poems

 

Ritwika Bandyopadhyay is currently pursuing engineering. Having won in poetry slam, open mic and creative writing events around Kolkata, she also maintains her own Facebook blog Mini Musings. Her works were also published in IPPL Kolkata magazine. 

Starless

The sky is starless. The bright city lights has robbed off my stars. I have no companions, no patron to look after me tonight. This paradoxical, fleeting breath goes in and out of my lungs. I inhale. I exhale. I am sad. Like every other night. Depressed. Deeply distraught. But there is nothing poetic about it tonight. Nothing to fascinate about. Nor I have energy to look for salvation of my soul. A temporary remedy or something to keep me sane. I am flicking the lighter, looking deep in flame in search of something I don’t know. I guess, I am looking for the end of bridge I am walking upon but it’s foggy enough to not let me have a sight of other side. I am afraid to take my next step. Ambivalent. Conflicted in my own head. The fear is back. Like old times. Anxiety gradually cripples inside me. I have no strength to face another mishap. Another day. I light first coffin nail of night. My phone rings. 

“How are you?”

“I am dead. BYE!”

I exhale. Sigh the sadness out. Somewhere far a sparrow twitters, and a man digs a grave with black shovel. The are no voices in my head, but silence. A silence that is deafening. Like a sharp cracking sound of an axe of someone’s neck. A half scream. An unnoticed cry of help. Sound of plane in windmill. Of hammer on someone’s thumb. Of a nail being pulled out of someone’s toe. Of a finger cracking in door. I marvel upon listening the sounds. Voices that are frail enough to not make it to someone’s ear. I feel sorry for them. What if they are persons? I ask myself out of wonder, and not out of sorrow. I believe, they are. These voices are perpetual memories of people I cared not to look upon, and simply walk past them. And now when I have come too far, and then they are distant and lost, I wish to start this walk from threshold once again. So that I might find myself in one of those voices, that I am not able to identify now. Because, it’s been difficult, you know. To live without knowing who I really am. That’s too much of uncertainty of life. I can’t bear it anymore. I might would have been able to bear it if I had seven hearts. But that’s not the case. I can’t risk it. So I fear the night I will quit. Jump of the bridge at any point or fist fight the whole world. Because, you know, 

I feel a pain somewhere I don’t know. And I got to do something about it.

Maybe someday I’ll do something about it…maybe someday… 

Still the Addressee

I haven’t told anyone yet

But my poems are only

A re-arrangement

Of the letters meant

To be sent to you.

An alteration of words

Lodged deep in my throat

That I deliberately

Placed on paper notes

As revised sentences

Hoping they’d mean

Something else

In newer sequences.

I tried writing

About mountain ridges

But it ended up

Describing the valley

Between your ribcages.

I wrote about oceans

And changing tides

But it sounded like

Waves of missing you

That couldn’t quite subside.

I filled the space

You left with concepts

From astronomy

But still found a way to

Correlate you with gravity.

The universe is a witness

In my attempt to re-invent

And reconstruct our story;

But even through my poetry,

You end up being the subject

You’re still the addressee.