To the Wind that speaks of Stars
The poet's imagination takes wings and journeys through a rusty evening, dead-end stairs and leaves that fall with ashes of the sky.
My evening is rustier than yours.
It comes at a time when I return
After navigating all the forbidden borders.
Like the metamorphosis of dead-end stairs,
It tangles a thousand nocturnal eruptions
around my toes and
all the lost traces of a country
that once grew inside me
rise like fire inside water.
The leaves fall
with the ashes of the sky.
And with it,
all that was born from a hand
that nurtured the ground beneath my feet.
I make a garden from there,
wear it around my neck
while carrying all the bits of your self
with the loudest of silence.
Meeting of Two Waves
When all the doors close down
I wait at this window,
running my clumsy fingers over its grills,
desperately trying to seek out rain
that can feel your hands.
My room is hundred years old
like the bylanes of my city,
where every shadow that trails behind
tells stories of you and me.
I keep a few parchment papers at my window
for you to write the chronicles of time.
For it is time that brought us here
from all the aimless wandering.
Your window is on the other end of the story,
that sometimes looks like mine--
weary, grey and old with the weight of time,
where flowers bloom and die the same night.
And you show me the light of a storm.
You leave a thousand untold words inside
its empty spaces for me
to colour the nauseating days.
The windows stand at the two ends
of the city,
like two wingless birds at dusk.
But in sleep when all the world is dead,
I see them melting in each other
like the meeting of two waves at the shore.
Oindri Sengupta is an Assistant Teacher of English at a Govt School in Kolkata, West Bengal, India.She had been published in national and international journals like The Lake (UK), Istanbul Literary Review, Chiron Review (USA), Outlook India, Plato's Caves Online, Abridged (Northern Ireland) etc. Her debut collection of poetry 'After the Fall of a Cloud', has been published by Hawakal Publishers, New Delhi (2022, February). Her poetry has also been adapted into a play named, 'Another Rainbow', by Alternative Living Theatre (Kolkata).