Three Poems by Dr. Ajanta Paul

 

Caesura

 

Waiting for something to happen

like those long days in August,

blank pages stretching

 

in the year's tedious diary,

no entries, no marginalia, 

no hasty circling of words,

 

no bored scribbling, or cryptic signs

in the corners of dog-eared dusks,

nor even an asterisk of anti-climax,

 

just the slow stirring of paper,

and the sound of the centuries dozing

in palm leaf siestas,

 

occasionally hustled

by a donkey driver's sharp cry

as he flicks his whip,

 

smell of desert sand

in Nostradamus' nostrils

while he heaves history

 

from out of the dunes of time,

a poet playing with rhyme

in silence's metrical scheme.

 

Hiatus of hope

when everything is caught in stillness

in the caesura of civilization.

 

 

Tonight I Shall Sleep

 

Tonight I shall sleep

In the lull of the boatman's song

As he pulls to the evening shore.

 

I shall run my fingers

Through the fretted lace

Of the mermaids' tresses

 

Wrought by the waves

On the sand; fine filigree

Fraught with absence, so empty.

 

Emptiness is an abstract noun

Which has little

That is abstract about it,

 

It sits heavy on the heart

Like water in a boat

That is about to capsize.

 

It's a dynamite laden memory

Ticking away at the back of the mind,

A time bomb of a thought

 

That could have gone off anytime

Till you defused it with that look in your eye

And it detonated within,

 

Scattering the silence

Inside the skin

Of hypocrisy.

 

Tonight I shall sleep

Like I have never slept before.

Resting my head

 

In the crook of destiny's arm,

Safely gathered up

Out of the way of harm.

 

When dawn scissors the might

I shall claim the black pieces of velvet

Which fall away, as my coverlet,

 

Turn on my side, and return

To that great deep,

Beyond emptiness and fullness

 

To the just-rightness

Of that moment in peace.

 

 

Distance 

 

Distance

 

may not be plotted

only teleologically

 

through history's climaxes

connecting important exegeses,

 

or measured on paper

through the swinging caper

 

of the compass in life's geometry

as it traces a spatial trajectory,

 

configuring an Euclidean certainty,

or geographical proximity/polarity

 

between places in the atlas

confounding cartography,

 

or in the space between stars

calculated by astronomers,

 

but also in the map of lips and eyes,

in the gap between cynicism and surprise,

 

in the tenuous border

between dream and nightmare,

 

and in journeys searching for nectar

in the nomadic nest of poetry, rare.

Dr. Ajanta Paul is an academic from Kolkata, India who writes poetry, short stories and literary criticism. She has published in literary journals including Spadina Literary Review, The Pangolin Review, The Piker Press, Shot Glass Journal, Poetic Sun, The Wild Word, Capella, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, Verse-Virtual, The Punch Magazine and The Bombay Review. A Pushcart nominee, Ajanta has published several books of literary criticism as well as a collection of short stories The Elixir Maker and Other Stories in 2019 (http://www.amazon.in/dp/B07N42KG1Q?ref=myi_title_dp) and a book of poetic plays The Journey Eternal in 2013 (https://publications.salesiancollege.net/publications/books/a-journey-eternal-poems-plays/). Her latest academic offering is American Poetry: Colonial to Contemporary (Avenel, Kolkata, 2021) while a volume of poems From the Singing Book of the Soul: Fifty Poems (Setu, Pittsburgh, 2022) is in press.