Words had sunken into death
Time and again;
Tides of moments
Washed off this mouldering chest
And its barren banks.
Still light could rend through
The unlit womb of woe
To meander into life
With raindrops nectarous
In its trail:
Webs of dreams wreathed around
The archaic arms of a bounteous tree:
They have lent voices
To the unvoiced.
Hail, Muted Pen!
Rise from your grave
To sing for us
On such an auspicious day!
Across time and space
With sinister spikes in their dubious chests
They have struggled to carve out
Those arteries to the centre stage:
An alchemical art in its ambitious rage.
This ancient earth, too,
Is a sinister cave, then.
It is of no use to blame
Those grey lures of fame
That transfigured you of late
Into a modernist man:
“Cautious, politic, meticulous”.
I have lingered on the imprints
Of your clever, agile feet
And their betrayals engraved
On my clumsy, crumbling knees.
With an ineffectual patience
I totter towards a vague destination
Obscure like an unlit face.
No more do I muse over
Our shared memories.
Both of us together, this far
Have sojourned in a dark station.
( Quotation from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” )
A Transformation
Once upon a time
A notorious temptation
Termed suicide
Appeared redemptive to me!
Then I came to know
That these aberrations and pain
Meandered through a malfunctioning brain
With cankers abiding
Like an eternal curse
And it eats dutifully to this date
Into the lineage, legacy and state
Of the primaeval parents of men.
I have abandoned of late
The arbour of that censured phrase.
The throttling vision
Of an afterlife
Of darkness binding
Has set my inept quest
For light in motion.
On occasions, murks and grime, too,
Are moulded in a benevolent fashion,
To pity the ill-starred at times perhaps
They wear each other out
Within a dark, surreptitious station.
At this point, this forlorn I
With stones jingling in the heart and all
Of its drab entrails and the debris nigh
Chats at length with an AI
On a solitary, suicidal nightfall,
To search together for a draught of solution
For years of agonies, betrayal and illusion
Congealed into a maddening drive of thirst
On the parched plain of an ancient station
Known as the earth.
What could they find
About the road to redemption?
Ah! An objective re-exploration
Of the pillage of expired passion
With a sacrophagal self behind!
From above the moon stares
With a sneer full of light.
The constellation of sociable stars
Sip coffee amidst guileful mirth
And their home shines bright
With an ignited, blissful hearth.
Night after night
I have twined
These deboned, desperate arms
Around my diffident neck
In search of a coveted end
To a forbidden circle of pain_
Archaic and original,
Primal as the Genesis of men
Still, craftily hidden.
Yet, every time
Those fingers struggled
To print their strength
On this pallid throat,
The infirm heart rose
From its feverish bed
To preserve the paltry lives
Of my fragile vocal folds:
Theurgy conjured for fun
By an insolent will force!
And I live to this date
To tell the tales
Of myriad souls lost in the dark
Scuffling with psychic ailments
In silence!
Matralina Pati, a Ph.D. research scholar at Bankura University, specializes in postmodern marginal bhasha literature in English translations. As a UGC-NET-JRF awardee, she holds an MA in English Literature, graduating First Class First in 2020. She has authored a book of translations titled Monsoon Seems Promising This Year (selected poems of uttoradhunik poet Rudra Pati, translated from Bengali into English). She has presented her creative and critical writings at various literary and academic forums across India. She is a budding bilingual poet and translator, based in Bankura, West Bengal, India.
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