CITY SCAPE
Across the broad streets the buildings
Shape shadows and human whimpers
Clutter the sideways. We nurture emotions
Like unwanted money plants sprouting
Patchy colours on corroded window hinges.
Always the city tosses sleepless on its own over
A bed of dead neon lights. A train
Shivers in its rush to deliver lonely
Passengers to deserted stops. Darkness
Shimmers with overhead stars and loses
Eyesight. this is my city. My homecoming
Coos with pigeons on the acute ledges
And the city overacts in wordless
Gurgling of lost noises and unwritten
Autobiographies, before yawning again.
INSIDE A DEAD PICTURE
Hide the bite marks,
Darkness has only turned
Sides. here shadows grow
Barbed hunger inside the
Waiting beast, snoring violence.
This untamed animal of colourless
Cruelty has barged into
Many silent pictures. It has
drawn macabre graffiti in human
Blood splattered in failures. It was
also printed bloody tattoos of
disorder in silent curses
and unsung death,
on our dreamless chests.
We have forever manuscripted
Sacred texts, we have composed
anthems and drawn new maps. Yet
this eyeless gape has
scurried past the ceasefires of
love and humanity,
with claws of incessant ruin,
damning men and machines.
Hide the wounds,
Now the night roars, for
How long who knows. The
Darkness has only turned
Sides.
GOING AWAY
Our mangled sighs will furl atop
Such distances yet not adorned by the
Bleeding stones, the road left sometime
Back as hungry bookmarks forgotten
In an unread manuscript. You said, who
Read monuments of breaking hearts now a days
And a lonely bird cried whole night
With chillingly dark memory strings.
Nobody could sleep. How could
Measured dreams that climb without love
Resist the temptation of dying without
Even knowing? And you easily survive
All these. Distance has its own excavation
inside the journey of lovenessness.
The museum of pebbled sighs is now no more
Free, charges entry fee in quorum of
Lost relations. You said, who reads
The history of unused emotions spent freely
Nowadays. distances applauded.
(Amarendra Khatua is India’s ambassador to Argentina. Known in diplomatic circles for his negotiating skills, Dr Khatua is a prolific poet who writes with the same finesse in Oriya and English).
Author Profile
