TRAVELLERS – Poems by Aritra Sanyal

It was still in the making
And no deliverance from memory ever since.
Even if the whole crumbles
A disturbing sense
Of having lived here, brick by brick,
Will survive

Such an acquaintance with you
Is a life – almost sentenced.
No mystery down there,
Controlling my experience
Makes me a threat falling prey to myself, endangered.

I always see a man wriggle in pain
Striving to forget something the way a sun sets

I think a light breeze is blowing now on earth, blue

The wheezing wind for someone who is not taking part
Seeing a no-moon silence sticking to a subtle chord
As if, on a string stretched from the current state of heart
To
The state of heart
There in sun soak an ecstasy, a melancholy, both white, equally
And a distant gush of your smile like clean wind swells them up
Discovery is nothing but finding a circle
Or at least a point to start a journey back
A circle is the most generous geometric figure
It reminds me of the couple of your shaggy, weary minds
My cave’s name is Silence
There is a planet called Endurance
And I checked in Heartbreak
I checked out Existence
There is a planet called Myself

Knowing the shadows that make the water restless, I drown myself in
Something essentially missing,
To feel the fluency of life in a fish.
Deliverance, my friend, hurry up,
From a distant spot
Your emotions are visible, bent over
People who know human want
Who know how nausea becomes an offering from within,
Who have never failed to understand the line of thoughts so far,
Know that the pebbles and the stones – are actually rivers
Frozen during the time
A poet hibernates in helplessness.
Deliverance, once you’re back,
In roots and in ores
The shadows bristle at loneliness

From afar, a faint music resembles a beautiful ruin. As if Relationship is like an old city, it has rolled a sunset down carelessly to the underbelly and shadows, we all know, are your tangibilities shorn of bodies

Now I imagine something about a Famine. Something very homely, patient. Like, siring the horizon, he has turned to his right sleeping, free like birds in light colored indifference and Life, who is not up yet, looks like a leftover of something like life, seen from a speeding train,
Believe me I can feel the wings of a yellow landscape, a light river, a girl’s half-happiness

Travel essentials like- childhood memories, a piece of glass, and the exclamatory arch of your eye brows- should include a certain detachment so that even after seeing our children being born to search a good, a bad and an ugly in the debris of a fairytale, we, like the trueborn aliens can keep our hearts air-conditioned.

An old man who holds a torch in broad daylight was seen looking for some cracks in logic some centuries ago, right here. From the airport of flies covered with floral scent the earth takes off for somewhere love has not yet weighed on life.

Aritra Sanyal is a poet, translator, researcher, and an ex-sports journalist who presently works as a teacher of English language in a school in West Bengal, India. He is a doctoral candidate at Assam University focusing on the novels of Amitav Ghosh. Earlier he worked as a research fellow in University of Calcutta under the supervision of Prof Chinmoy Guha in a major research project: Impact of France on the 19th an early 20th Century Bengali Literature. He is the author three books of poetry. Forthcoming is Ekta Bahu Purano Nei (An Old Absence) from Pathak Press, Calcutta.

Featured image: photo by Simbala Désilles.