Poems by Sanghamitra Halder for Villa Romana
Grimace
You are not remembered wholly, are you in the muscle, in entire body
or waiting in some creases like a wave or a ditch?
If the leaves are shaken by an absent wind,
not a ghost, I feel like a legend
O Absent! I so desire to adapt you!
People go to market all around, lose purses
On the turning of the road, I see someone mimics your walk
I come to a nominal distance to follow, I see no original anywhere
There is no you in you
You were grinning from the muscle only to make this writing happen
Unreasonable
So long there an ‘Unreasonable’
has been sitting inside our rescue
You may say it’s a bird. You may say: ‘Fly,
weave lake songs to our remission’
It may be easily said
So, I do not say it.
None is there to care
Do not utter a word
Just utter a stare
The School of Good
With the spirit of a marathon runner and a long preparation
I have come to this point of no return
Everyone’s advising – be good
But how much good?
Who is good?
A kid in half pant is happy if he finds back lost marble glass balls
He tells his name – ‘Good’
His name would be struck off from the register of the school of good
before anyone has even a clue
Exile
Let me be hung up
in the light of autopsy. secretly. publicly.
Ransack my heart before that
Stifle for ever
my organs of speech – my machines of Yes and No
Let my desire for trees be bloody
in search of water in desert
Let me be banished far, so far that
I forget the rhythm of Yes in yes, No in no forever
Yes, I am dangerous. Send me so far in exile
That I forever forget the sound of water
Too Many Minds
Tree of slit leaves, you seem to be dated before Christ
Your cottage is lost inside a sunset
There still grew no beard line in the chin of Jesus from Nazareth
Enemy party was still ill tempered, straight forward
How unfeigned it was to mix poison in drink
There was still not so much layers of silt in heart
It was still not rare
to end up in someplace else with the desire to go somewhere
In this evening
My mind has become so many
I suspect everyone around myself
One Lonely Absent Gesture
It seems to be an ungraceful village from past life
Eying to it a dream came to me yesterday
As if I am wholesomely touched by the festive sunshine
What makes me so happy, so much light seeing whom
I cannot remember
So, the ripened yellow betel nuts extended glance through the window
Which light is this, which leaves set this morning to tune so smooth
Trying to think of this
I became a gesture of awakening
The world became too awe struck to take a notice
There still had come no crow in this story
None believed it – that someone may wake up in a story like this
Novel of Light-1
You are a bird because you return home in the dark
A palm tree looks so ancient when it is lonely
Head upwards, a dog has been reading it since then
The heart shakes in such a sight
The lonely dog and its weeping become faint
As if there is no hustle in the town
As if no insult would chase from now on
As if I do not have to overcome this sight to reach somewhere
Novel of Light-2
You have peeped into this wondrous light and read my heart
The heart broke into many pieces
The pain numbs
You dragged all the healing into a shadow
and left a novel of light
There is no mole on the lips, all the smiles are drenched in water
I am a newer man then, after the long journeys
I peek out of the novel of light to see
if anyone recognizes me
This Side, Alone
The tune makes a suspect
Whether it is unearthly enough
The household mimics
I set the debate on a tree-top
It gets fruitful
One Bad Writing
I see that I am being gossiped
in the colony of words
The extent of borderline and vices
that loom in the character’s map
here and there, sticky
My neighboring words do suspect
whether anyone wipes off the ink
How promising is a bad writing
No one can understand until you don’t look at its movements
You can’t understand how much breath it exhales
into the wall of its neighboring words
Sanghamitra Halder is a Bengali Poet and non-fiction writer. Born in Kolkata, 1984. Studied Master of Arts in Bengali Language and Literature. First poem published in 2004. Till now she is the author of five Bengali poetry collections, NAAMAANO RUCKSACK (2010), DEERGHO-EE (2014), HEY EKTI SAMBODHAN (2016), ANUPOSTHITIR SHABDO (2017), EKA EK UJHYO MUDRA (2019) and a collection of literary prose writings—RANDHANSHALAR SHIS (2017). Her poems have appeared in various literary and commercial magazines as well as in anthologies. and have been translated into English, Spanish and Italian. Took part in several literary projects in India and abroad. Together with Animikh Patra, she is co-founder and co-editor in chief of the bilingual literary site duniyaadaari.com, a literary magazine with which over the years The Dreaming Machine has established a partnership with exchanges of translations and presentations of poets. For more information on the poet and the magazine see here interview in English on The Dreaming Machine website.
