Four Wonderful Poems by Kushal Poddar

 

The Plagued Language of Love

 

Below the leaf-empty boughs,

underneath our 'Memory Tree',

my father shovels with all his might

the reasons leading him there.

The other things we gardened

when I used to wear kindergarten shorts

display language's failed landscape.

An used blue mask flies from bushes to shrubs.

One yellow foot of a chicken. A dust serpent.

 

I lock my father in a safe,

entangle my wife on an afternoon bed,

watch the plagued streets

she stares at topsy-turvy.

A handmade violin player sells his merchandise

from one closed door to another.

 

There is a word that represents all these.

Search engines cannot optimize it.

 

Left For Nothingness

 

Statics cackle. An orchestra of insects

plays a leathery elytra music,

and the riverboat leaves the jetty

as the city becomes another kind of insect,

the one whose belly bags the soft fire in protest

against the darkness of the late springtime.

Leaving? Where to? I hold a paper ticket

to ticking oblivion. The insects dissect silence

and murmurs of the commuters alike, and then

there hum the machine, water, shadows.

The other Bank is nowhere to be seen.

 

Jazzy Sighs

 

The wraith of her husband

in his navy blue blazer,

all of the cloth sagging,

 

to the music by Ella Fitzgerald

she sways in promenade position,

unlocks memory's ballroom dance lessons.

 

Night train crosses the bridge. Hail Emptiness.

She wets her finger on her tongue

and touches her forehead, breasts, and

between the ribcage with its tip.

From my apartment window French

I see the navy blue blazer fall as she opens her hands.

 

The House of Noir

 

I smite the woodwork.

The 'Do Not Disturb' door quavers.

 

She emerges wearing

one wrinkled bed sheet

that holds together

the history of humankind.

 

This I is the I

I could have been -

living, leaving, trailing, finding, seeking,

drinking the room no. 6.

(The motel keeper is a creep!)

 

She doesn't meet the eyes.

Somewhere a Tomcat opens a can of moaning.

One blue and red flasher passes by.

The bye lane has two dead eye cams.

 

This could have been a murder.

One of the crows flew out in time.

An author and a father, Kushal Poddar, edited a magazine - ‘Words Surfacing’, authored seven volumes including ‘The Circus Came To My Island’, 'A Place For Your Ghost Animals', 'Eternity Restoration Project- Selected and New Poems' and 'Herding My Thoughts To The Slaughterhouse-A Prequel'.

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