Lines under a street lamp

The shadows are long in unknown streets
the insects hovering over sick neon lights
like strangers from faraway lands,
they look beautiful under shadows
and die in the sun, each day.

A small boy sits in its jaundiced light,
sick and yellow with hunger?
Somewhere from a remote gali
Pakeeza comes alive-

I climb a rock and read a poem,
I scream I shout and enact,
at my nonexistent audience.
They clap in their busy songs,
in callousness strewn over each other.
A black moth approves-

People fill the roads like rats,
milling over-
careless, faceless,
hurry in every crease.
Lovers pause for life,
behind a lamp, a shrub?
Life lives for a while.

A phone rings,
my shadows come home-
On the road back,
in pieces I become my role
and play it.

 © 2013 Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury

( Image from http://www.google.co.in/imgres?start=353&sa=X&biw=1024&bih=653&tbm=isch&tbnid=8L_NUUlUKQ9ctM:&imgrefurl=http://www.colourbox.com/image/medieval-deserted-alley-at-night-with-yellow-street-lamps-image-2226054&docid=1SfwfSpqpLGqgM&imgurl=http://www.colourbox.com/preview/2226054-706585-medieval-deserted-alley-at-night-with-yellow-street-lamps.jpg&w=417&h=480&ei=OwSBUrDUD4TBrAewgIGICw&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:71,s:300,i:217&iact=rc&page=19&tbnh=175&tbnw=145&ndsp=19&tx=78&ty=78 ) 

For Kamala Das

She died..I am told today

Her seed lisped out a cry

"Prayers for her..a silent something?"

What do I pray for a soul so satiated

Someone who feared to go so..

Someone so me in the me'O mine

I can but see her as a we..

The loss of someone close

The fear of loosing the presence

The stillness of it all

When the mind shrieks in silences

The soul cannot hear

For its journey from wherever to whenever has begun in earnest

The still of the body

In smiles that you see no more

In the cotton ear plugs that allow

Your cries to filter no more

In happy stillness they sit on a body that was once OURS

When death approaches in footsteps that wonder now here now there

When all at once it dawns on us that

she shall perhaps smile no more

fear no more

cry no more at the fear of shall we say 'The going'

The realisation is perhaps a relief in questions of the unknown

But would like to know from this disturbed soul of fears

was the passing a quiet?

And then the questions galore pour forth

Are you there again amidst us maybe in the hug of a woof

In the books that gather dust

In the little eyes acoss the lane that smilingly do their dance

Are you here somewhere in the presence that was ours?

Or are you gone and truly forgot, in the insence sticks I burn

Spiralling in their wafty smoke, the essence of a life all but gone?

In memories and in pages and in words that you leave for us

We find the you & you the us

For in that we are but connected

Perhaps in that umbical cord alone

You shall live a life fuller than what you thought you had

In the hyms of today, and hands folded in prayer

Let the you be rested

your essence in our minds it lingers

In the words that corpses can never be

Somewhere in this eternity called time

If the world were even to doom

the words would linger for posterity

In a hung transition called time

Like Sun, the moon and stars they assume a life of their own

Be not sad O Amma of mine

You leave not this world not its beauty galore

In urchins on the street and flowers that laugh

You remain within & within the heart.....

© 2010 Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury

To a Poetess

All my debts paid in vain
I wander back to life alone and forlorn
In her mappings and meanderings in the settings of the stage
She came and she vanquished and then left her seed to forfeit her claim
The wicked smile in place
Krishna & O Allah all in tandem they fall
musings but them all...
In awe springs of mutual desire as I... see her dance in profanity
when she and me we come together, tweaked we are as souls
I pay to you my ultimate
My soul you take my soul....
How many came at the altar of sacrifice thou called love
And I call pain..
How many came and loved but in vain
In being ME you became YOU
And in YOU I became finally the ME....

© 2010 Maitreyee Bhattacharjee Chowdhury