Cover art: Graffiti mural in Marseilles, photo by Pina Piccolo.
The Painting Would Turn Into a Real Village
Cane basket on back – we would go farming in the fields,
sit under a tree in time of recess, turning our back to the sun
a water bird would understand all these and keep calling in a faint voice,
it will make the time run through our arteries
We would harvest food in our small piece of earth,
go nowhere else, no great life we claim
Our seasons would be spent
inside a very mundane painting
The painting would become a real village,
and we would be the brushes, some of us coloured pencils too
When the heart lines get complicated
we would weave loom with silkworm saliva
We would exchange those words which can be heard only if you come too close.
There would be no candle in the room, yet the light would remain awake
Who Knows Where
We met in so many ways amid conditions so varied
Yet we never actually met
Warring nations, self-inflicted remorse, mellow evening- none let us be lonesome
no safe haven promised for wanderers
like a humble beckoning
To think deeper, this punishment is more archaic than you
Days and months have been passed by rotating like in an orbit,
still
the sabotage-season was about to come
I don’t know where it stayed halted
but halted nonetheless
I couldn’t finish telling
how your shadow like an assassin
has even shredded me into pieces
Deaf
When a sky-piercing cry has got hold of me
you showed me a stifling room
you showed a floor mat
paralyzed near the feet
at a time when I burn in anger
You showed me an intoxicated star in the night
half burnt smoke on the lips of a beggar
You entered my sleep and showed me
that my own flesh and bone forgot to burst out even in the blast
Explanation
There is no hint anywhere
Heads of all eternity bumped into the low ceiling of ours
There is no remedy in our medicine
All the healing lost amidst an assembly of crows
All forest ways are covered up by violent discourses
No windows there, and without it no door
Your explanation has turned me into stone
I have no audacity to get up and leave
Only a labyrinth has come in and saved me
Time Is a Bowstring
Indebted to: ‘Interstellar’ movie, 2014
You are coming from a distant land, walking into the future
From the present toward the ageless past
Your home becomes an outer world by an innocent torment
Your feet
turn into stones after crossing the skeleton of a dead river
You, the age-old you, so free you are
that you bend the bowstring of language and tear the TIME apart
And you vehemently let them off
to float on land and in water and in space
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 seven Bengali poetry collections, NAAMAANO RUCKSACK (2010), DEERGHO-EE (2014), HEY EKTI SAMBODHAN (2016), ANUPOSTHITIR SHABDO (2017), EKA EK UJHYO MUDRA (2019), TOMAAKE HABE NAA BOJHAA (2023), PAASHE BASAAR CHETANAA (2025, compilation of love poems alongwith Animikh Patra) and two collections of literary prose writings—RANDHANSHALAR SHIS (2017) & TAANTE BONAA CHINTAAGUCHCHHO (2025). 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.
