THE NIGHT OF GOGH

Many years, after many many years…

When, on canvas, myriad colours and water
had breathed
impressions of life in the latent embryo of Nature….

When all the hues
had gone blind of their colours

Then

One day

Bizarre God slapped on his eyes-
strange Spring of a lunatic….

no colours in his maudlin eyes

no vestige of ignominy

no abnegation

no periodic cycle of envy or consternation

Thus
fixed by the window sill
he sits his inert eyes
inside the ailing hollow of a wretched asylum

Staying up
throughout the eternal eternal night
nursing the lifeline of murk on his palms….

He has no work to do
He gazes an endless gaze…

Blurry artist
A pallid fog has left silts of vapour in his eyes

Yet

THE EYE sees……..
it is blue, a painful blue everywhere
In the bluish colony of the Creator
a forlorn hamlet sleeps beneath the moonshine

Sleepy rustic souls;
or perhaps
a century’s sleep of the lotos eaters
resting on the cursed pastures
by the empyrean magic of the nocturn grazier

They call him the moon…..
He sees a lump of light-
a radiant yellow, a dazzling orb of yellow

The womb of the pregnant dark ruptures
and dawns before his lunatic eyes…
every surreal xanthous night

In the porch of his vision stars take birth-

the chime of those eternal children as they bloom

the maiden cry of the newborn….

Like the brush playing on the canvas… music rings in his ears

Alone the lunatic sails in the ocean of his dream
Through his groggy eye

sees

The shimmering shiver
of a blaze that is blue… like the flames of fire a tree
The dance of the tree and its wings
exalting the birth of the sequined stream
in the depths of the molten night…..

Normal people stay asleep
like a well crafted silent suicide

There’s no sleep in the mental asylum
no history of slumber
One after the other, a dark a darker night…

Memoryless

Tireless

the mad artist stays awake alone
the star of his eyes filled with painful wonder…

The loony too marvels!
Perhaps he also has feelings!

And so
he is torn apart
he is ripped apart
by the welcome pain of the night’s endless burnings

the soul burns…. burns and drifts
the soul of his God-gifted insane eyes

Then
One fine day
Inside an opulent yellow field of wheat

when the ear of paintbrush
has flooded the meadow with echoes of golden moonlight

On one sudden bizarre night
a sinister pistol
tattoos the painter’s chest
with motifs of fire-flower…. horizon of flaming stars

The Insane…
only
that insane person knows

the amount of pain
the quantum of lovely pain
the song of a starry-night brings….

the pang of death….

is less than that, much less than that
Always less than that……

*********

Born in Asansol, West Bengal, India, Moulinath Goswami writes poetry in Bengali, his mother tongue and in English. Writing is his escape, his meditation. He writes prose and does translations in Bengali and English. He writes regularly for the prominent magazines and periodicals of West Bengal, like Masik Krittibas, Monon, Sahitya Srijoni, Katha, Kalimati Online, Mangrove (Bangladesh), Mon o Mousumi (Mumbai), Kaler Kantho (Bangladesh), Parampara ( West Bengal), Dainik Ittefaq ( Bangladesh), Swinhoe Street, etc. His first collection of poems ‘Dayal’ has been published from Prativas in the International Kolkata Book Fair, 2020. He has participated in the Multi-lingual Writers’ Meet organized by Bharat Bhawan, Bhopal in February 2020, as invitee for prose reading session in Bangla.