Two poems by Sankar Sarkar
The Same Sky
Don’t forget
don’t forget, even mistakenly
either we are friends or foes
we can never forget
we have been in conversation
like air and lung, body and soul,
and mind and feeling
we can not forget,
as the soil can’t a tree,
and a tree can’t the sun;
we can not! we can never be secluded
like an island!
we are a fertile land
to sprout evergreen flora
of love and humanity
to embrace this universe!
never forget mistakenly
we linked by the knot of relativity
thousands of relations clasp us
like ferns and fauna,
like light and dark
lighten and darken us,
yet we are clusters of tradition
along countless veins of creation!
Holding the same sky like a cenotaph
spangled with stars above the head
we have been haunting this world, this space
and the endless shore of mystery like the strangers
As countless living dots on the divine graph
we are nothing but this human map
We can never forget one another
Either we are in a tie amid ancestral or astral
Kiss
Kiss me kiss me
till trilogy of chemicals,
dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin
cause liaison between
physiology and cosmology
concrete and abstract
that unveils the unexplored world
between you and I,
the better half of the universe
Kiss me till bliss
roll down every vein
and brings Genesis flood
to feel the rhythm of heaven
in this electromagnetic body
Two poems by Sreya Sarkar
Unfamiliar Self
Time had swollen and disfigured her
Her skin couldn’t decide what to make room for
A transformed mind or the altered body
Both seemed alien. Both were uncooperative
The frown hanging between her eyes was her
The laugh lines sketching a sardonic tilt was her, too
Yet, the cakey mask was not her home
It had hardened her former frumpy, kind self into someone unfamiliar
The fardel of events had slopped unceremoniously,
Crushing her under the weight of delayed disenchantments
She felt porous like the Sandman in Spiderman,
A criminal mutated into living sand
She held the scalpel and carved herself into order
Tightened the softness and curbed the benevolence
The past was sanded with the utmost care,
What appeared now was a deferred self, a self tauter
With a dull resignment, she embraced what she became
A phantom of what she was, leading up to a path of plastic reality
The timing was perfect, ideal in every sense
A pathogen became her crutch, isolation her refuge
Art of Losing
A microorganism invisible to the naked eye,
turned the macro world upside down
Mankind transformed into a heap of organs,
Failing one at a time at a feverish pace
The freezing yeti footprints of death,
Stomped across the planet like an unstoppable storm.
Volcanic ashes of ennui covered all,
Emptied every color except the ambiguous grey.
All art was lost except the art of losing,
Man had to master it overnight
For an eternity he was trained how to hustle,
To limit his humanity, curb his conscience.
To keep winning was a necessity for survival
Losing was unacceptable, unfair even
Now with the rise of enduring loss in the most wanted skills list,
There is no school to teach him that.
He will face the face-less demon,
Let pain wash over him and his pride and finally unlearn
