Poems by Subhransu Maitra

THE KINGDOM OF AN OBSCURE, HANGING JHAROKHA IN AN OLD FORT

Whose secret stone bower it was
is not known. Only the shape remains.
Perhaps purposed for secret assignations,
the passions, the love it once cradled
in its stones,
the fond anxious or smouldering glance
and murmurs that once streamed down
as the owner of the jharokha, out on the balcony,
leaned across the low railing that
bore the weight of her heaving breasts,
remonstrating with her lover who stood below,
eager for the song of her arms to grow around him……..
** ** ** **
Love passion murmur glance cannot
now declaw time and launch themselves
back across the current bleak theatre
in a resurgent draft from the past.
The dangerous driving desire that
once lit up and swirled around the canopy,

pillars, balcony, railing, ornamental
brackets holding the structure up,
surely sang and hollowed itself out
night after night
flinging up a lonely brightness in the sky
and snuffed out the stars.
It mutilated its own jharokha-world
and sank back into the stones, cracks, fissures.
Only the stone shape remains hanging.
Its desolation now hurts it-perhaps-
into more meaning, more mastery
over transience and decrepitude. 

 

THERE IS A TAGORE SONG

 

There is a Tagore song
which begins--
Anandadhara bahichche bhubane.
( A stream of joy is flowing across the world.)
When I was first taught to sing it,
When we sang it in a chorus
To celebrate Tagore centenary at

Hindu School sixty four years ago,
the ceremony naturally gladdened me
more than the song.
I was nine years old and
my journey with the song had just begun.
Sixty four years later
I am not so sure about the joy part, though.
But a stream or dhara
still pours down its tropic deltaic course
seldom subtle, oftener menacing coarse,
smiting drowning the shores
in wails and shrieks till the song
stripped naked, tortured, still
wrenches clear of the foul flood
and rises like a radiant column
of redeeming vowels above
the swollen tide of
mangling murderous consonants.