Eyes
I have seen eyes that are
Like bits of beached glass
Hiding secrets of passages
On surging surf,
Carried far and wide
By the random tide
Buffeted and buffed, opaque
In their secrecy, edges smoothed
By the constant slap of sloshing waves.
I have seen eyes that are hard
Like flint stones
Grey in their neutrality,
But ready to leap
Into fire at the hint
Of friction.
And those like chips of ice floes
Broken off some implacable glacier,
Which, flowing downstream got locked
In a river, inscrutable and old,
Where no ships docked
And nothing was ever bought or sold.
Live, one Last Time
Push that syringe of sunshine
Into a body mouldy, veins musty
With blood that no longer sings
But croaks in patched plumbing
Like frost in kitchen pipes,
A bleak, bass, wintry tune
In the corporeal chorus of blues,
Accompanying the decline of all
Save longing for life.
The mahonias are overflowing
In the ebony vase of the night,
Their irresistible fragrance calls
Out to her: Breathe, breathe,
Inhale my sweet breath
Into your decaying sheath.
Let nothing, and no one
Come in the way
Of a feisty fightback
For you deserve, at least, a last revival,
Even if it's a blasphemous bacchanal,
A rebellious riot of resurgence,
A fleeting show of spirit
Before the final farewell
In life's ephemeral festival.
A Late Flowering
It was a late flowering
Long past its time.
Don't you see, the boughs
Are gnarled, they pointed out.
Moreover, there's a time for everything,
And this tree is past its prime.
When blossoms should have flowed forth
In cascades of froth
She was a like a cactus
Caught in her strange desert truth,
A whispering, wasted whirl
In a sterile spiral.
When the first bud came along
She thought it was a fluke,
One of those things,
Not really a sign of hope,
No, not at all.
She was proved wrong
With the burst of song
That scattered its melody
On the withered being
Everyone had given up on
And no one suspected of
Gestating such glory, unbeknown,
A harvest sown
In the soul's due season
And miraculously produced when
She came into her own,
With rare profusion
Of sap and sapience.
A home for birds to nest in,
And insects to breed their dynasties
In the flutter and flight of little lives.
She who had been written off,
Long ignored, but for estimates
Of firewood yield
Assumed an aureole of flaming sparks
In imagination's bower
As words flowered in destiny's dower.
Dr. Ajanta Paul is a
poet, short story writer and literary critic who is currently Principal and
Professor of English at Women's Christian College, Kolkata. A Pushcart nominee,
her poems and short stories have been featured in literary journals such as Spadina
Literary Review, The Pangolin Review, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Verse-Virtual,
The Piker Press, Harbinger
Asylum, Shot Glass Journal, Written Tales Magazine, The Bombay
Review, The Statesman and Setu Bilingual Journal, to name a
few. Ajanta has also published a collection of short stories - The
Elixir Maker and Other Stories in 2019 (Authorspress, New Delhi).
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