Five Poems by Kushal Poddar

 

The Inside and The Outside of That Space

Dark listens well. Light talks

and talks. One word sits

on the cornice. Another tiptoes

on the fence. One word buries

a bone.

Once, while under a mad spell

I dug through the whole garden,

dug out your longest sentence.

If I found it earlier everything

and nothing would have changed.

Right now, dark listens with

the rapt attention of a good kid

who already knows- inside

and outside of a classroom

are different.

The Address Printed On The Envelope Is Never Enough

The postman still visits.

He forgets my address

everytime and enters

through the other entrance

and calls me asking for

the direction inside the compound.

Today even I cannot remember

the path between the buildings,

through the patches of weeds,

bypassing the startled cat. I cannot.

I ask him if he can see my hand,

a brown one, that waves at nothing

through the black collapsible gate,

eager for the letter, eager to trace

that address printed for on the envelope.

Homestay

The moon floats in the brine broth.

A boat kisses the shore. Its lips taste sad.

You have been fragile once,

want to be that again, overthink

the possibilities and omens,

judge a man by a moment.

Those footprints on the sand

can be anyone's. You repost them

on the same face of the earth.

The thoughts are reduced to be ducks,

and they too return to their homestay.

Insomniacs

During these insomniac hours

night stands in its speckled pajama.

The entire middle class becomes poet

They do not know. They wait.

Sleep rides a torrent. Sleep sleeps

on a blue plastic roof,

and no one writes down those thoughts,

and a handcart moves from one end

of the dark to the other with

mist piled upon it for anyone

who wants to pay and take it home.

No one where I live sleeps.

They wait. They wait for the text

of the morning.

 

Fated to Satiate

When the predator and the prey

begin to breathe as one,

and when the wind adds a shiver

to the grassland, and the river holds

on to the hollow of a tunnel

that they are yet to engineer,

I see the absence, emptiness

gain a structure, wear some flesh,

stagger and stumble toward me

and be me as if all my history

is the fall of a rodent, silent

and fated to satiate the gray and white owl.

Kushal Poddar - The author of ‘21 Gun Salutes and the Hemingway Syndrome’ and 'How To Burn Memories Using a Pocket Torch' has eleven books to his credit. He is a journalist, father of a five-year-old, illustrator, and an editor. His works have been translated into twelve languages and published across the globe.

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