Five Poems by Gopal Lahiri

 

Cadence

 

Imagine there is a giant screen

showing every word, every letter,

every odd even fault lines, inverted moon

a rock, a wonder of stars linking

the method to the madness.

 

All eyes walk towards the horizon

wilderness calms under the blue vastness

striving to free the colours from the hibiscus.

 

His voice is a touch from a distance

with footsteps that will like to plant

shingles and spores in cadence.

 

I need the change; I pray for it now.

 

Incomplete Prayers

 

I dive into the winsome

blue body of a summer

morning,

I touch gently to others

who are hairless, eyeless, mute

standing in the corridors

with other shadows alongside.

 

The night does not see anything,

but in this brightness of saliva,

all of us leaving behind

incomplete prayers,

our shells break in stroke after stroke,

under the sign

of water, our children enter the sanctum.

 

Ancient Script

 

Now solitude flares in silence

You must speak to it,

only the drowsiness that ties your shoe,

that raises its head

know I am aging faster,

The train rattles into dusk

how to go on until tomorrow?

 

Nothing touches me

I often lose all desires

on the street,

Is it me dreaming at its own pace?

sunrays often slash the shadows

Is it myself I leave behind

in an ancient, torn script?

 

Dyad

 

1.

                                                                                                       

In the wide-open field

the stars rest on my shoulder,

the immense vista of silence

between the lines,

waits at the edge of the sleep,

each moment is a quiet recollection,

the moonless night is so complete in itself.

 

2.

 

A crescent of rock-framed sands

washed by arcs of blue water,

I do not know

how to speak before

my own silhouettes,

I only learn to sit and condense,

clouds bow down to touch the earth,

 

Resistance

 

The sky is in all its openness,

the twist of the funnel cloud is in

a cusp of disappearing in twilight,

the face of the sun appears to blush in a

sense that something revealing may take place.

 

I sit on the bench in the children’s park,

the words are grouping together in my head.

Are they band of resistance or finding ways

of escaping to the no man’s land?

I can’t stop them from fleeing.

 

I close my palms with the caress of a lover,

this imagined presence of absence is intense.

 

Before something starts or ends,

I know I will forget everything in the sleep.

 

 

Gopal Lahiri is a bilingual poet, critic, editor, writer and translator with 29 books published, including eight solo/jointly edited books. His poetry is also published across various anthologies as well as in eminent journals of India and abroad. His poems are translated in 16 languages. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2021. He is the recipient of the Poet of the Year Award in Destiny Poets, UK, 2016, Setu Excellence Award, 2020, Pittsburgh, US and Indology Life-Time Achievement award, West Bengal, India. His latest collection of poems ‘Alleys are Filled with Future Alphabets.’ has received wide acclaim.