A Home Within
There is a home within a home.
A home where stories of lives give birth
to many others to be left untold.
A place of beautiful wanderings and solitude.
When a crow forgets to return to its nest
because it remembers too much of the light,
the home that lives within, comes alive
with all its fruitless longings.
Our wanderings are always with the moon.
And in this long journey to death
I have come to know that home
is another illusion born out of those moments
when we were busy separating light and darkness.
Love: A Difficulty
Love is another difficulty
that fixes you inside a hollow
like the centre of a supernova,
unsettling all the moments
that were grasping your fingers
from falling over the stubborn days.
When the sun felt lighter on skin and
not like those when your thoughts
tore you apart,
love felt like a dreamer’s soliloquy
gliding through the feather of night,
whispering softly what morning flowers
tell the sun about all the whys of springs.
I had the vision of a land where
love would fall from the fading moon
to give birth to another
that comes only when the sky dreams
after the fall of a cloud.
Our vanity is too big to hold all that love.
Solitude Is A Song
Sometimes solitude tastes
like the numb strumming of a guitar
that falls on a lazy afternoon like
the accidental appearance of a monk,
when you were about to tell yourself
that life is full of iridescent colours of monotony.
And when you sit with a few hours of sand
that suddenly drops from the wings of retreating bird,
solitude shows that life is a number
which has a memory of its own
like a forlorn café at the end of a street,
waiting for its number arrive.
And when you learn to carry it
through the mist of time,
it brings you back the rose you left behind
for all the hundred evolving springs.
Infinity
It takes years for the light to pass through a shadow.
It takes years for the moon to burn like dew.
Years. Days. Months —
all that ticks inside our fingers,
are the journey of a leaf inside the storm.
When sun travels to the other world,
I become a tree.
My feet grows into soil to find scales of fish.
Through my hands, water flows
like the melancholy of stars.
I live inside multiple spaces at the same time,
swimming from one vernal light, to the light of the fall.
Coming of age stories are not for me.
I teach my arms how to fix an empty lampshade
when the light outside is too blinding.
I rise like the sound of a woodcutter’s axe,
deep, airy and full of trepidations.
Voices are colourless shadows,
engulfing us whenever we try to find ourselves.
Oindri Sengupta is a poet based out of Kolkata. Her debut collection of poetry, After the Fall of a Cloud, has been recently published by Hawakal Publishers.
