Five Poems by Kushal Poddar

On The First Day of The Year

 

The birds descend, folk, fly, rerun the event.

Our fists shower grains, and

the seeds unwind a pale gold peacock's train.

Now it exists; now it does not.

 

Now the child rushes into the eye of the bird circle,

and now the scene ebbs.

The noise constant-forests the temple northex.

A sage clad in perma winter clothes stares at us.

 

 

Fish

 

Sea comes, plays with the shore,

leaves it wet, but reruns the lore.

Two fish, we caught. You murmur

something about ocean being a big graveyard.

I nod. Sleep shores up my nodding head.

Two fish, we caught, kept in

one faded paint bucket, noisy and struggling,

whirl to imitate an yin yang I dream often.

 

 

Kerouac

 

The jazz hand of the signal

mesmerizes the railway road.

Here desires to be There.

A blue becomes my face.

My tired car punctures the time.

 

A hiss bleeds out in the air.

I am tired everyday. I am the everyday.

The last roll of the toilet paper

holds the tale of my life, and

the anecdotes of a pandemic sleep syndrome.

 

I call my friend died last month's first Sunday.

He whispers, "Hear the local train pass.

It plays the wind like God.

The music is God."

 

 

Narrative

 

He can see her, his wife,

singing in their son's wedding

and drowning in the pallor of cancer,

him singing to her. The song he

cannot recall is a milestone.

One can move either way.

 

He can see her, the song.

A woman blinds it with her hands,

soft, whiting away hands.

She says, "Guess the lyrics, dear tune."

 

 

Winter Estuary

 

A dog bites the silence

out there in the morning.

The dog bites again and again

and yet in the end

silence wins it.

 

Ripping the chill apart

gushes in a few children

shepherded by their mother

sharing the complaints against

this new uniform they cannot afford.

 

A few stressed stretches yonder

Autumn wanders into the winter.

Kushal Poddar - An author, journalist, and a father, Kushal Poddar, editor of 'Words Surfacing’, authored eight books, the latest being 'Postmarked Quarantine'. His works have been translated into eleven languages.

Twitter- https://twitter.com/Kushalpoe